


Don’t Feed after Midnight

by Hobbitual_Psychick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, Fanart, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2021-04-15
Packaged: 2021-04-17 06:42:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 25
Words: 44,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21701296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hobbitual_Psychick/pseuds/Hobbitual_Psychick
Summary: The angels have fallen. Castiel is human. There’s a prophet in the guest room and the king of Hell is chained up in the dungeon…Something else is awake, and it’s walking the halls of the Bunker.
Relationships: Castiel & Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester & Dean Winchester
Comments: 52
Kudos: 58





	1. In the midnight hour

**Don't Feed After Midnight**

Chapter 1: In the midnight hour

It was dark and quiet.

The wooden door with the brass plaque labelled "11" eased open and a dark shape emerged.  
It moved soundlessly through the darkness, stalking the empty corridors, each tread falling silently, laid down with constrained predatory grace.

Sliding through another door, this one labelled "23,” it stalked forward.

A door cracked open and luminescence spilled forth, lighting up a pair of narrowed yellow-green eyes. Eyes which surveyed the lighted interior intently, searching the victims on offer.

Hunger clenched within, the force which had awoken and driven the hunter from it’s den, demanding insistently to be slaked, despite the lateness of the hour.

Most victims were discarded out of hand. Various reasons for their unsuitability were calculated at lightning speed by the predatory mind behind those lambent green orbs.

Only two victims seemed suitable. But then, at the last moment, another victim presented itself.

White teeth bared in the darkness, sharp amusement welling within, for the perfect evil of selecting this one victim above all others, to slack the hunger, which had torn him from dreams of blood and violence, and driven him there.

***

Dean Winchester sat alone in the darkness eating his brother’s organic blueberry yogurt.

Luxuarating how for the first time since he was 4, he had a home, a real fridge stocked with more than left over takeaway food, and the ability to indulge in midnight feasting.


	2. Useless

**Don’t Feed After Midnight**

Chapter 2: Useless

"Mornin'.“ Dean greeted, looking up at his brother from cleaning the weapons. “What you got there Sammy?"

Sam was carrying a dusty, ancient box; everything in the Men of letters Bunker was practically antique, including the the storage boxes.

It was a bit like living in a museum, Dean mused, something he had yet to grow used to or comfortable with. Sam on the other hand had taken to it like gang busters.

Sam grinned at him, teeth flashing white through his mop of hair as he leaned over the box and drawing a knife from his back pocket to cut the honest to god ’twine’ that tied it closed.

"This Dean, is a piece of history!" Sam enthused— as if that didn’t describe everything in the place. He pulled a rusty metal box from the cardboard one, flipped it open and revealed a bundle of time softened paper, which he opened in turn.

The thing inside was large, black and clunky looking; and had a crude resemblance to a camera.

"It's a Fairchild k-17 aerial reconnaissance camera. Not just any Fairchild k-17 either, Dean." Sam shot him a dimpled grin, cradling the thing reverently in his giant-ass paws, "this one came from the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, crewed by none other than Private Leroy Winchester, in World War II."

Dean shot him a dubious look. "Right... so you're taking up photography now?"

"Oh no, I doubt it works, Dean. Getting film for it would probably be a mission, too."

Dean let his frown deepen and opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again.

  
"Leroy Winchester?" He asked finally after a pause.

Sam tipped his head. "It occurred to me after the stuff with Aaron and the Thule that we're Legacies, which means…."

"That Henry wasn't the only man of Letters in our family."

"Right, right, and if there was one thing the Men of Letters seemed to love, it was keeping records."

"So this Leroy Winchester was a man of letters, like Dad’s dad, Henry?"

"Leroy's older brother, Jethro, was actually. Three brothers, Jethro, Leroy and William. Must be where our middle names came from."

"Jethro and William… yeah, kinda explains things." Dean frowned, he’d always sorta hated his middle name.

"Apparently Mom and Dad didn't name you for the character on Beverley Hillbillies, or Jethro Tull after all." Sam smirked following his train of thought.  
"Can't blame me for wondering."

"I can and I do Sam. Just like when we were kids.  
So, I got the bookworm huh?"

Sam nodded "...Jethro corresponded with the Judah innitative a few of times. Couldn't join the war effort because of childhood polio, it left him with partial paralysis in his right leg."

"Gimpy bookworm, great!" Dean muttered and rolled his eyes. You could guarantee Sam’d get mileage out of him gettin’ lumbered with the name of _that_ brother. At some point it’d come bite him in the ass, count on it with Sammy. 

  
"So you've gone all crazy Aunt and developed a fetish for our family tree now? Wonderful!” he scoffed. “Please tell me you aren't gonna go draggin’ all the useless lame-ass family heirlooms outta storage, to junk this place up."

"It's not lame, or useless." Sam drew the thing back against his chest looking bitchy.

"You just said, ‘it probably doesn't work,’ Sam.  
By definition, if it don't work, it's useless."

"It's history Dean! Part of the war effort. I thought, I thought you'd like it... I mean you usually can't get enough of old machines. The, the car..."

"Baby ain't useless, she does her job, earns her place…"

Sam's face hardened and it occurred to Dean suddenly, that talking about things being useless and not earning their place, made him sound a whole lot like Dad when they were kids. Bitching at them over every single non-essential they tried to haul with them from town to town.

Sam put the camera back in it's box and let his shoulders slump, all previous animation fleeing.

Dean sighed to himself and rubbed at the back of his neck, why did Sam have to be so damn sensitive?

"Sam…” _I didn’t mean it like that, _he wanted to say, but faded off.

"No Dean, you're right.“ Sam replied shortly before he could say anything, ”Leroy, Jethro, William and Henry, they're all dead, gone.  
Died in the line of duty. Doing their jobs," his mouth twisted like he'd bitten into something sour.

Dean watched Sam’s hand clench into a fist, noting uneasily it was the one he'd cut during the demon cure- That final trial, meant to close the gates of hell.

"Think I need a shower," Sam muttered and turned his back, before running a hand down over his face.

"I'm covered in dust…" he said again, waving a hand back at the box, "I'll put it away later, okay?"

Sam’s defensiveness over the whole ‘doing your job’, thing suddenly made a kind of sense to Dean; or at least he could follow his brother’s inevitable trajectory. He watched his brother walk away from him, feeling troubled.

  
Did Sam still feel that finishing the ritual, and sacrificing himself, _had been his job?_ That standing down had been some kind of failure, that doing so made him useless?

Part of Dean wanted to chase after his brother and tell him, order him, to understand. That it hadn't been his job, that standing down had been the right move.  
The only move.

But he knew Sammy wouldn't want to hear it.  
He could scream it till he was blue in the face, and Sam would still think what Sam thought.

The only thing Dean could do, was be grateful his brother was still there, with him.

Walking over, Dean looked down at the, 'piece of history,' Sam had dug up. Went to lift it out of the box and was caught off guard by it’s unexpected heft. Surprised by the weight, he fumbled. It spun out of his hands and clattered loudly to the floor.

"Sonofa—“ Dean looked over his shoulder guiltily.   
Crouched hastily to retrieve the camera from where it had landed, on the floor, under the table.

_Crap_! The damn thing was broken. In pieces, with what looked like fine splinters of glass scattered round the separated bits of the camera and lense housing.

"Great, just great! Sammy's never gonna let me hear the end of this... Breaking his damn piece of ‘family history’.” He picked up the lense housing and was surprised to see the glass wasn't broken.   
What he thought to be broken glass from a shattered lens, turned out to be salt.  
Musta spilled it at some earlier date, while one of them was filling salt rounds.

He picked up the body of the camera, looking it over for damage.  
Surprisingly, it too appeared unmarked by the fall.

"Guess they really don't make stuff like they used to." He muttered, relieved that he wouldn't have to admit to breaking his brother's 'piece of history,' or hide the evidence.

Straightening, he placed both parts on the table.  
Oddly the two components didn't feel nearly as heavy as he had thought the whole camera was only a few moments earlier.

It took him mere moments to reassemble the reconasance camera and dump it back into the metal case it had come from. 

Sammy wouldn't be any the wiser, and if something inside was broken, he could plead ignorance.

Satisfied, Dean flipped the metal box closed decisively; as he did so, something small and green was swept up, out of the box by the puff of air. It fluttered to the floor by the hunter’s boot.

As Dean turned, and walked back to the weapons he had been in the middle of cleaning, his boot scuffed over the thing, breaking one of the lobes off the tiny dessicated four leaf clover which had fallen from the box.


	3. Anticipation

**Don't Feed After Midnight**

Chapter 3: Anticipation 

  
Crowley lifted his head and looked around sucking a lungful of air through his vessel's teeth. Something had changed!

He'd been stashed in the Winchester's bondage dungeon for a while now.

At first, he'd thought it was an improvement on being trussed up in the boot of their antique gas guzzler.

But, wherever this was, it had been warded up the wazoo, and not with hastily scrawled spray paint or chalk devil's traps. Something he could have conceivably worked his way out of given enough time and the help of a convenient leaky water pipe.  
This warding, Crowley had to grudgingly admit, was a real work of art; made of what appeared to be magnetite inlaid into the marble flooring.  
He'd never seen the likes of it before, and that was saying something. He'd made it his business to become cognizant with all manner of wardings and sigils, over his years, even before becoming King.

The small sensation, the shiver of power, it stirred up a tantalising sliver of hope. Perhaps one of his less moronic (and more scheming) underlings had decided to go behind his back, and ignore his blanket embargo on Stateside visitations. Perhaps they’d followed him; wanting to spy on the King's activities. It was a favourite pastime of the riffraff after all.

Conceivably, he could perhaps dream. That said clever, scheming underling had tailed the Winchester's from the church to this locale. (Where-ever this kinky new club house the Hardy boys had acquired was.) Hope that what he'd felt just now, heralded a daring rescue in the offing.

But no, he set the idea aside reluctantly.   
For all the muffling effects of the dungeons wardings, the shiver of intrusive power he’d felt running it’s fingers up his spine just now, it might not have felt heavenly. But it wasn't demonic either.

Which begged the question, what were Rocky and Bullwinkle up to?

The most likely culprit would be Dean, Crowley decided after some contemplation. There had been something _rather wrong_ with ol' Moose in the church.  
Something not explained by blood loss or the common cold.

Then, Dean had appeared, just before Sam had been about to finish the cure.  
He’d made that impassioned plea for Moose to stand down, not finish the trials, claiming doing so would kill Moose. Purported that curing Crowley, finishing the third trial, and closing the gates of hell was designed to require the ultimate sacrifice.

  
Samantha hadn’t seemed to much care about such consequences. Moose had a bit of a Martyr complex.

But Dean, of course, couldn't bear such a thing.  
Being left alone, without Samantha to hold his hand; _nothing_ was worth that to good ol’ Dean, _even_ shutting the gates of Hell!

So big brother had used that special brand of Winchester codependency and emotional blackmail Crowley had come to adore, and Samantha had folded like a bad hand at poker.

Crowley suspected stopping the younger Winchester from reaching completion hadn't saved or fixed Moose like Deano had hoped, simply postponed the inevitable.

After being bound, gagged and tossed in the trunk, he’d heard Winchester the elder's voice raised in panic. Talking about hospitals, trials and angels falling…  
  
There'd been a period of driving at breakneck speed.  
Then, a flurry of activity, and for a period of approximately a day, neither Winchester had come near the car.  
Which left him to fall into an almost dream like state. Wracked by a rising tide of thoughts, memories, foreign sensations ... and feelings. All of which made him wonder disquietingly if Moose was the only one not back to factory settings, after the cease and desist.   
The Winchester's had left him there, prey to his traitorous mind, trussed up like the proverbial Christmas turkey. While ambient sounds of ambulances, sirens, people and vehicles had filtered into the car's trunk, and led him to guess he’d spent those hours parked up in close proximity to a hospital. Which one, that, he remained clueless on.

At some later point Dean had returned, to ask if he was alive, (such touching concern.) Then there'd been a scuffle of some sort.

By the sound of things it had involved more than one individual (he was guessing evicted overwrought angels.) Said individuals had demanded Castiel's location in less than friendly tones.  
Not long after there'd been a white flare and an angelic death scream.  
At another guess, Dean must have dispatched who ever was so interested in his feathered boyfriend.

Another indeterminate while later, the dynamic duo had returned.  
That time there'd been two sets of footsteps, so presumably, Moose had once again been moving under his own steam.  
They’d been accompanied by a shimmering cloud of ozone scent, which advertised, "angelic healing," in screaming neon, especially to something with Crowley's demonic senses.  
Puzzlingly, they _hadn't_ returned accompanied by that expected third set of footsteps, or the constipated gravelled voice of Castiel. There hadn’t been any indicators of the angel's presence in the back seat of the Winchester's Chevy either.

More driving had ensued, an activity of which he had grown heartily weary of by that point.  
Crowley hadn't been able to fathom how long, or in what direction they drove, it continued for several days, with several stops.

The trunk opened only once in all that time.  
Both Winchesters' had gawked in at him for a bit. Sam seemingly surprised to see him still alive, and more than willing to fix the oversight, then and there.  
Dean, however, hadn't been in such a hurry to dispatch him. Claiming to want to pump him information. Not a wholly moronic idea.  
Possibly, Dean was also quietly considering the option of finding someone _other than little brother_ to make the ultimate sacrifice and close the gates. Crowley’s narrow miss with humanity-reprised, might merely be a postponement rather than a cancellation. Bollocks!

They’d then shoved a bag over his head and earmuffs over his ears, disorientated him further. That had taken away what little sensory input he had left.  
Nasty trick, one which surely breached some form of human rights...pity he wasn’t human. Or he’d sue.

Another interminable length of drive-time later they’d reached this lovely destination.

Jollygreen and co. had dragged him none too solicitously, down endless metal steps and along echoing corridors, to drop him off in this cell... without so much as a phone call!

Moose had seemed strong enough, still stinking to high heaven of angelic ozone, but underneath that, Crowley had smelled something else.  
A smell that reminded him nostalgically of Dr. Emil Gelny's work at Mauer-Öhling. The scent of psychiatric patients fried from the inside out, after undergoing a fatal dose of electroshock therapy, courtesy of the Third Reich.

Dean seemed distracted, and Samantha had smelled all wrong.

Dean often appeared to work with multiple plans on standby, something Crowley had often enjoyed and quietly admired about the man.

If he suspected Castiel's angel powers hadn't been up to snuff, hadn’t fixed his giant baby brother, that _would_ explain why he'd been stored away here. For later... like the proverbial squirrel storing up his nuts against winter.

If Sam wasn’t healed, frantic attempts to fix Moose's trial induced issues would follow, as sure as night followed day.  
Perhaps a healing spell of some sort would explain the little jolt of whatever he’d just felt. He had his doubts a simple healing spell would do the job, or fix what Castiel couldn't; and once Dean ruled out other, less palatable options to save his nearest and dearest. It would only be a matter of time before Crowley could expect a visitation; he’d already had enough time to partially dislodge the earmuffs and blindfold.

Being stored away for later, would be the real reason Dean Winchester hadn't spiked him with an angel blade or that Kurdish demon knife.  
Perhaps he did hope to obtain names of Crowley's earth side operatives like he'd claimed, in front of Samantha. But Crowley knew it wouldn't be the real power play. He was a card up Dean‘s sleeve, stored away, to make up that winning hand.

Still, it wasn't like Dean to be such a tease. To talk of torture, then simply up and leave a girl all ready and wanting, like he had. Being left untouched in the Winchester's little bondage dungeon, stewing in his own juices, was disappointing...  
Dean never struck him as one to tease and then not put out. If rumors were to be believed he was a man of action not words...  
Dean ought to have broken out the holy water, salt and stabby things by now.

  
Disappointing really, in his current position as King, he so rarely got an opportunity to switch things up. Dean had been Alistair's star apprentice, and Samantha had been tortured by the devil himself.  
Both Winchester brothers were bound to have a whole host of titillating little tricks up their sleeves that could make playtime educational for all parties.

The King of Hell licked his lips and fidgeted impatiently, making his chains rattle.

"Deannnn. Deannnnn…. Samantha….. Anyone?  
Anyone at all?!" He called, hoping to raise some kind of response.  
"Seriously boys, a little bit of anticipation is one thing, heightens the excitement. Delayed gratification and all that... But this… this is just — _dull_!"

There was no reply.

How long were they going to leave him down here?

Somewhere, far off, water pipes groaned, and a door slammed.  
Weirdly the sound of moving water tickled something inside of him, a momentary sensation of thirst, something he hadn't experienced in hundreds of years.

"Oi! You boys have heard of the Geneva convention, surely!" He yelled once more.  
"Fair and just treatment of prisoners of war, ring any bells?  
Where’s my phone call? Would it kill you to get a man a drink?" He bellowed.

More silence replied.

Then suddenly the door to his boudoir slid open a crack, and an eye peered in through the gap, low to the floor.

Intriguing!

Crowley tilted his head in consideration.  
"Well well, _you_ are _definitely_ not who I was expecting." He murmured, levelling his most charming smile upon his barely glimpsed visitor.  
"Sadly, I'm a little tied up right now, but don't let that put you off. I do _so_ enjoy making new acquaintances, hearing interesting tales. Do tell, who are you, and what _is_ this fascinating place, yours I assume?"

The eye blinked at him through the gap once, but there was no reply.

"Don't be shy." He coaxed. "Tell you what, I'll go first shall I? The name's Crowley, King of Hell."

From the other side of the door his guest made a disbelieving or disparaging sound.

"Oh, don't let my stylish accessories fool you friend. I am the King, and I'd be most happy to prove it, once we get more acquainted, if you could perhaps see your way clear to simply—"

  
The door to his cell creaked shut, followed shortly after by the sound of retreating footsteps.

"_**Bollocks! —"**_


	4. Dream a little dream (of me)

**Don't Feed After Midnight**

Chapter 4: Dream a little dream (of me)

Kevin was on a stage, his cello steadied comfortably between his knees, upper bout resting against his chest, it’s neck in position perfectly above his left shoulder, C tuning peg by his ear.

He smelled the faint whiff of the rosin he preferred to use on his bow string; sweet and gingery with faint musky undertones. A smell which always filled him with certainty and peace. A knowledge he was in control.

Looking out towards the audience, he saw his mother sitting front and centre of the first row as always, beaming up at him in pride.

Beside her sat Channing, a look on her broad face that he knew well, the slightly off centre smile, that told him Channing was feeling nervous for him, but pretending otherwise. He smiled at them both faintly and nodded, careful not to seem over enthusiastic in front of an audience.

A movement from the corner of the stage caught his eye.

Turning his head, Kevin caught sight of the denim and plaid clad brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester. They were lurking in the shadows, waved and gestured to him urgently.

Something inside him froze, hand tight upon his bow. Gritting his teeth in sudden discomfort, Kevin jerked his eyes away from the two men.

What piece was he supposed to be performing?

A moment of panic raced through him.   
He looked to his music stand. Found, not sheet music as he expected; but a weathered stone tablet covered in carved, ancient writing.

_As if translating the word of God wasn't hard enough, now he was expected to perform it?!_

"Hmmm," a strange voice murmured from some where close by. "Interesting place this. A crossroads demon claiming to be King of Hell in the basement and a prophet of the Lord in the guest room…"

_King of Hell?_ Kevin startled in escalating panic, just as a blocky man in an expensive black suit stepped onto the stage creating a hush.

Kevin knew he was running out of time.

What piece was he supposed to be performing from the tablet?

Was it the demon or angel tablet… or another he'd never seen?

_These people all expected too much! He couldn't do this!_

He looked around in blind panic, worried he was going to make a fool of himself in front of everyone!

Sam and Dean would be mad. And his mother, she would be utterly disappointed and ashamed of him!  
Channing would be mortified!

Looking out to the audience again, he searched for his mother, wanting to make eye contact with her, to tell her with his eyes how sorry he was, for embarrassing her like this.

Then realised, she was gone! 

That Channing was gone.   
  
Turning his head again, he saw Sam and Dean were gone also.

Everyone in the auditorium had vanished.

Everyone except for him, and the man in black.

Seeing the audience was gone, no longer expecting a performance, it should have reduced his anxiety and escalating expectation and dread.  
But it didn't.

Instead the audience’s absence made his heart hammer faster and his stomach twist sickly.

There was no-one to protect him now!

The man in black turned to face him.

_Crowley! _Kevin identified in sick horror.

He tried to force himself to get up and flee the stage.

Found he couldn't move.

He was pinned in place, motionless.

"I thought privacy might make it easier to chat." The demon King purred with a smile. "Decision time, Kevin. How's this going to go?   
Read any good tablets lately?" Crowley raised a brow and adjusted his jacket lapels fussily before making eye contact again.

  
"Don't be recalcitrant, Kevin. _You know it_ brings out the worst in me."

"No!" Kevin breathed in helpless denial.

"Yes, Kevin!" The demon tutted. "I see you've got all your fingers back.  
I can fix that."

Crowley snapped his fingers.

There was a sudden, sharp pain in his arm.

Looking down, horrified, Kevin saw that his left wrist was now just a bloody stump.

Thick rivers of blood ran down the strings of his cello to pool on the glossy wood.

Yet still, he couldn't move.

"I know we're not mates, Kevin, but one word of advice – run." The demon tilted his head looking down at him with red flooded eyes. "Run far and run fast. 'Cause the Winchesters – well, they have a habit of using people up and watching them die bloody. Ask Mummy, she'll tell you...  
Oh no!" Crowley pantomimed a look of shocked remembrance, "she can't, can she? The Winchester Boys let me kill her, didn't they? 'Cause Mummy _wasn't useful._" Crowley smiled down at him once more, teeth bared bitingly.

  
"No!" Kevin sobbed in helpless denial.

"Hey, enough of that!  
Wake up!" The strange voice commanded and there was a sudden pain in Kevin’s scalp, as if someone had pulled his hair.

...

Kevin startled awake flailing in terror.

For a moment his befuddled mind told him there was some kind of little creature with big eyes, bat ears and a squashed face staring at him from a perch on top of the Angel tablet.

He'd fallen asleep while translating again.

Kevin flinched in surprise and blinked.

There was nothing there.

  
He was rubbing at his eyes when the door to his room opened cautiously, making him startle all over again. But it was just Sam Winchester, standing there in bare feet, sweat pants and a t-shirt, his hair still damp from a shower.

"Hey, you okay? I heard…" Sam shuffled his bare feet awkwardly, probably not wanting to say how he’d been yelling or squealing like a girl, or something equally as mortifying.

"Ah, yeah. Just a bad dream…" Kevin sat up further, reached for his coffee cup and took a mouthful. It was stone cold and bitter. He grimaced and spat it back into the cup, rubbing wearily at his aching head.

"Nothing like stale, cold coffee after waking up from a nightmare," Sam gave him a wonky half smile and held out his hand, "let me get you a fresh cup…"

Kevin sucked another pained breath and opened the bottles of pills Dean had given him, "for pep and for pain," palmed a few from each bottle and tossed them into his mouth, chased them with a mouthful of the cold bitter coffee, nodded and handed Sam his cup.

He watched Sam's eyes skitter over the white plastic bottles, a frown of disapproval forming. His mouth opened to say something. But then, the younger Winchester seemed to reconsider, and shook his head slightly.

"And maybe some food too?" He offered, instead of the expected lecture on pharmaceutical study aids, "think we need to do a food run, but I'm sure I can scare something up…"

Kevin nodded distractedly, his eyes drawn back to the angel tablet.

Food seemed like way too much effort.

Sam turned to go, then stopped again, "What was the dream about?" He asked.

Kevin looked up at him, eyes narrow with sudden resentment. "Crowley, I dreamed about Crowley! Are you satisfied? I dreamed he was torturing me again!"

"Kevin—"

"What Sam? Are you going to tell me I'm safe? That he can't hurt me anymore? Seriously?! He's just downstairs. Is it any wonder I'm having nightmares?"

"Kevin— it's the safest place we have to keep him." Sam said earnestly.

'_Since you didn't toss him back where he belonged and slam the gates of Hell behind him, like you promised me!.' _Kevin wanted to scream. _'Crowley killed my mother, he tortured me! If you weren't going to do what you promised and lock them all away. Why couldn't you kill him? Why?!" _But he knew why they couldn't. Because the Winchester's thought Crowley was useful.

He ducked his head and stared at his hands.

"Yeah I know…" He muttered sullenly. "I better get back to work… find a way to put the angels back where they belong…"

He pulled on his headphones and cued up some music, picking up the angel tablet.

"Yeah…" Sam replied, turned, walked out, and shut the door.

...

A while later Sam returned with a bottle of water, a hot cup of coffee, a grilled cheese sandwich, with a slightly worse for wear apple balanced on the side, by which point Kevin was so deeply immersed in translation he barely noticed picking up the coffee cup or taking a mouthful.


	5. A dash of cold water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now with fan-art on each chapter

**Don’t Feed After Midnight **

Chapter 5: A dash of cold water

Sam ran a hand through his hair and grimaced. There was still conditioner in it which he hadn’t gotten to wash out. 

He’d been in the shower washing his hair, when the water had inexplicably gone ice-cold; he’d stood there, futilely twisting knobs, blinking through suds, his eyes stinging.

  
After a long moment, he’d given up and stumbled out of the shower stall to escape the arctic torrent, hair still dripping product. Spitting a string of curses.

He’d stood there, out of the flow longer still, attempting to restore the warmth; but to no avail.  
The pipes had refused to cough up anything but ice melt, and the sound of water from the old pipes had begun to sound like mocking laughter by the time he‘d given it up as futile.

Shivering, skin prickled with goose flesh, half from cold, half from the associated memories that being cold always brought.

_‘...Sorry if it's a bit chilly. Most people think I burn hot. It's actually quite the opposite...’_

Shuddering, Sam had pulled on his clothes and hastily towelled his hair. Fled the memories, and shower room, like the devil was behind him.  
now his scalp itching and greasy.

One of the main things he enjoyed about the men of letters bunker, were the showers. They had surprisingly good pressure, and seemingly endless hot water.

Until today.

As youngest son, raised in an incessant string of down and out motel rooms, with a Jerk of a big brother like Dean, he’d experienced more than his fair share of cold showers growing up. Dean believed that using up all the hot water was his god given birth-right of eldest son.  
Dean hadn’t changed much, truth be told, he always spent ridiculous amounts of time in the bathroom. It got so much worse after he hit puberty. A smart kid, Sam had speculated for years how much of it was due to him exercising his overactive libido, but never asked, Dean was apt to over-share in response to such enquires.

Anyway! Point was, the bunkers seemingly inexhaustible hot water was an asset, and now they were getting older, aching muscles and bruises were not as easy to shake in your 30’s. Reliable hot water helped, a lot.   
Besides, being cold was something Sam found hard to tolerate these days, for reasons. There were times, after a certain species of nightmares, when he _needed_ to stand, letting scalding water beat down on him for nearly an hour. Until he could no longer feel memories of those ice cold hands on his skin.

So yeah, the Letter’s shower rooms and it’s endless hot-water supply were something he had come to quietly treasure.

Sam wasn’t totally sure about the machinery that powered the bunker. It wasn’t like there were utility bills, but they’d worked out some things, from pawing through the stacks of blueprints in the machine room.  
They knew that power and water were piggybacked out of the old WPA power plant built along the river. That everything appeared pretty automatic. The way it was set up it might conceivably keep running til the next apocalypse. The problem was probably inside the bunker somewhere.  
After Abbadon murdered all The Men of Letters, the place hadn’t exactly been getting regular maintenance.

...

On the hunt for an explanation for his icy shower, Sam headed for the stairs to the lower levels. But then he heard a hoarse cry from Kevin’s room and paused in his tracks.

Was Kevin okay?

Might be a nightmare, the kid had been sleeping odd hours, or not sleeping at all. Those things caught up with you, Sam knew that game well.   
Sometimes, on nights and mornings when he woke dry mouthed and heaving chested, he’d contemplated how nightmares were the only real payment you could expect for trying to save the world.

The least he could do was wake the kid up.

Sam pushed Kevin’s door open. Saw the prophet slumped at the desk, blinking eyes still heavy with sleep, he’d probably passed out translating again, had obviously scared himself awake.

“Hey, you okay?… I heard.” Sam stopped himself, not wanting to embarrass the boy.

"Ah, yeah. Just a bad dream…"

Sam nodded, watching Kevin fumble for his coffee cup, take a sip and gag.

Did the kid even drink coffee before all this?

Mrs Tran had struck him as one of those organic Mom’s, the ones that prohibited sugar, caffeine and artificial food additives; had one of those color coded calendars in the kitchen planning out all of Kevin’s extra curricular activities, so she’d be sure not to miss any of them.   
A far cry from Sam’s own pre-college experience, sneaking around behind Dad’s and Dean’s backs, (well mostly Dean’s ‘cause Dad was never there.) 

Pitch battles over ‘pointless bullshit school activities,’ trying to secretly write entry essays and cram for SAT’s by torchlight, under blankets or in the back of a moving car…

Now here Kevin was, a college drop out, as addicted to coffee as the rest of them.

"Nothing like stale, cold, coffee after waking up from a nightmare. Let me get you a fresh cup.” He offered, watching Kevin throw back some of those pills Dean had gotten him.

Of course, Kevin may have just as easily been one of _those_ kids; forever pushed to achieve by an overwhelming load of vicarious parental aspirations. Forced to pop pills just to keep up with Mommy’s unreasonable expectations.

If there was one thing Sam knew from the life he’d lived, a family’s outward appearance often hid something totally different behind closed doors.  
Kevin hadn’t quibbled at all when Dean got him those pills.

Still, those things couldn’t be good for him, especially on an empty stomach.

"And maybe some food too?” He offered. “Think we need to do a food run, but I'm sure I can scare something up…"

Kevin’s eyes were on the tablet again, dismissing Sam as unimportant.

He remembered doing the same exact thing to Dean at about the same age. The focus of youth, and a desperation to escape the life which was caging him in.

Sam sighed and ran a hand through his greasy hair again, thought he should probably say something more, let Kevin know he wasn’t alone. Dean would have…

“What was the dream about?" he asked.

Kevin flinched and glared up at him, and Sam noted how darkly Kevin’s slanted eyes were underlined by sooty shadows.

"Crowley, I dreamed about Crowley! Are you satisfied? I dreamed he was torturing me again!"

That was one way Kevin differed from him. If you asked a Winchester about his nightmares he’d brush you off, pretend it was fine, or that he didn’t remember. Kevin was so much more open. Not hardened by a lifetime of exposure, knowing that if you couldn’t say those things were just bad dreams, a problem shared was a problem doubled. 

“Kevin…” he began, suddenly uncertain what he ought to say. He might have far too much experience with torture and nightmares himself, but he’d yet to discover a useful way to negate their effects.

"What Sam? Are you going to tell me I'm safe? That he can't hurt me anymore? Seriously?!”

Sam swallowed and stepped back, startled by the boy’s vitriol.

“He's just downstairs. Is it any wonder I'm having nightmares?" Kevin demanded, blinking those exhausted, red-rimmed eyes at him.

What was he supposed to say?

That he hated Crowley too?! Surely Kevin knew that!

So many people had died because of the evil little bastard.  
Just to start off, he’d led them to believe the Colt could kill Lucifer. Jo and Ellen died because of that pointless mission.

Then, there was how Crowley had coerced Cas into opening purgatory. The demon was to blame for the Leviathans escaping and everything those monsters had done. For Cas’ actions, after he’d been warped into thinking he was some kind of new god; the Leviathan doubles of him and Dean making them into wanted men, massacring people whilst wearing their faces, live… all the way along the line to Dick Roman shooting Bobby. All those nightmares led straight back to Crowley’s door.

Then, most recently, Crowley had murdered all those people they’d saved.   
Sarah Blake had choked to death right there, in front of him, killed by a hex bag hidden in the phone, like it was all some kind of sick chess match. Just so Crowley could mock them with how much smarter than them, he was.

Sarah had had a life, a husband, she’d been a mother! A good woman, someone Sam could have imagined having a life with, if things had been different.

Crowley had nearly murdered Jody to. Asked her out on a _date_, wined and dined her, screwed with her head, _for the fun of it.   
_Left her coughing up blood.

Crowley was a monster! It wasn’t like Sam wanted to have Crowley there under their roof any more than Kevin did. He sure didn’t want Kevin to relive any of what the evil sonofabitch had done to him during his captivity.

Sam saw a lot of himself in Kevin; they had both been smart and on track for a bright future; until demons broke their lives apart and destroyed everything. Both of them had watched the girl they loved killed by a demon.

Sam felt he’d let Kevin down, more than anyone else, apart from Dean; he’d left Kevin in Crowley’s hands to be tortured after Dean and Cas disappeared killing Dick Roman.  
Kevin would be living a normal life now if the Leviathans had stayed in Purgatory, and they had have never broken open the Leviathan tablet.

Sam was ashamed of how he’d just folded and left Kevin in Crowley’s hands, after everything that had gone down at Roman Enterprises.  
He’d left Dean in Purgatory!   
That was another thing he had to blame Crowley for; not searching for Dean when he was in purgatory. He’d tried summoning the demon, frantic to make a deal and save his brother from Hell, and Crowley had said Dean wasn’t in Hell, so he couldn’t deal.

Sam had assumed his brother was dead, but safe and at peace in heaven, and he’d never take heaven from Dean.  
Instead, it turned out Dean had been living in some kind of eternal Monster fight club all that time.   
Crowley hadn’t lied, but he hadn’t told the truth either, he must have known where Dean and Cas ended up.

Yeah, okay, none of that excused him for not searching for Kevin, or leaving him in Crowley’s slimy clutches, all that time. But he remembered what it had been like after he thought Dean was dead, he’d been a complete wreck. Alone, out of ideas, spun out and fighting the urge to just eat his gun, longing desperately to join his brother. Except he knew, if he took that route, he wouldn’t have ended up in Heaven, he’d have landed in Hell, because he was tainted with demon blood and killing yourself was a sin, wasn’t it?

Back then he’d hardly known Kevin. And yeah, he was mostly just dead tired of it all, _always_ having to be responsible for saving everybody else.

To his eternal shame he’d done what he’d always done, run away, and hid his head in the sand.

Now, he hated himself for that weakness and selfishness, suspected Kevin and Dean probably did too.

Maybe if Crowley hadn’t taken Kevin, things could have gone differently, he’d have had some sort of anchor.

Instead he’d run and kept running, shell-shocked and at a loss on what to do. He’d run mindlessly, until he hit a dog, then Riot and Amelia had become his anchor. Until that fell to bits too, when Amelia’s husband, a war vet, turned out not to be dead, after all… and came home… So he’d bowed out and left her to the better man.

Sam shook thoughts of Amelia away.

When the time came to kill Crowley, he’d celebrate the demon’s death. But Dean was right; killing him straight out would be stupid, a lost opportunity.

Sam blinked back to the prophet; aware he hadn’t responded for far too long.

"Kevin— it's the safest place we have to keep him." He said apologetically looking down at his hands. Staring at the hand he’d opened with a knife to finish that final trial, and make Crowley human, awash with all his many failures.

"Yeah, I know…" Kevin replied sullenly, and Sam hated how defeated the kid sounded.

** [ ](https://66.media.tumblr.com/484391fa85d2440091ad2f495b1e71c8/b7a18beb01741a22-99/s500x750/bee1948feafdf28fb792beb776a1808fe95dbc50.jpg) **

"I better get back to work… try and find a way to put the angels back where they belong…"  
Kevin said and pulled on his headphones, picked up the angel tablet.

"Yeah…" Sam agreed and turned away, left Kevin to it.

He made his way from Kevin’s room to the kitchen, all the more aware of how many ways he’d let Kevin down.  
He should have finished the job, and made Crowley human, he should have closed the gates of Hell.  
Maybe a human Crowley would have spilled the information they wanted willingly.

Or had it all been talk? When Crowley asked about looking for forgiveness, in the church. Had it all been another ruse?  
Maybe Dean had been wrong, maybe Naomi had lied, maybe the trials wouldn’t have killed him... Even if it were true and the trials were a death sentence, surely his death would have been a small price to pay to shut the gates of Hell. Plenty of good, innocent people had died for less. 

The kitchen was empty, Sam dropped Kevin’s cup into the sink with the scatter of mugs and ran the water for a bit to spare himself scrubbing them out later. After a few moments, steam bloomed up from the flow of the faucet.  
Sam stared at the steam frowning. Did the showers run on a different system?

He shrugged to himself, and opened the morgue style refrigerator, peering in. There wasn’t much in there, leftover fried rice and enchiladas that had to be weeks old. Half a loaf of bread, a few stray slices of cheese and some dried out looking deli meat, butter, a couple of apples that were beginning to go pruny and the carton of organic blueberry yogurt he’d picked up on a whim on the drive home.

Yeah, a food run was long overdue!

He pulled out the bread, thinking to make Kevin a sandwich; only to discover on closer inspection that spots of green mold were beginning to grow on it. He pulled out the carton of yogurt instead, thinking granola and yogurt might work, only to discover his yogurt carton was empty.

A whiff of gun oil and a subtle change in the air told him Dean was standing in the doorway behind him.

He dropped the carton into the trash with a huff of annoyance and turned.

“How many times do I have to tell you Dean, if you finish something, toss it in the trash!” He muttered.

Dean blinked innocent green eyes at him, “Why you blamin’ me Sam?” He asked looking mortally offended, “I’ve told you before, that organic shit is probably chock-full of hippy l-o-v-e, you know, like the coleslaw from KFC.” He shuddered theatrically, “give me processed with food additives any day, it’s what our country was built on, Sam.” 

“Seriously Dean? How can you even say that after the whole deal with Dick Roman and Sucro Corp?” He shuddered remembering the whole tur-duckin thing. “And I know with our job it’s hard to get this, but there is such a thing as a bullshit urban legend. Besides Dean, who else would I blame, this place doesn’t have a skivey motel manager, and if you weren’t aware, we’re the only cleaners round here.”

“Maybe Kevin…”

“Yeah,” Sam snorted in derision, “Kevin barely leaves his room. Which reminds me we need to do a run, we’re out of food and Kevin should at least be eating something, if he’s gonna keep popping those pills you gave him.”

They’d argued about the pills before and he’d been over-ruled on the topic by both Dean and Kevin, but he’d be damned if he was going to let the kid wind up back in the state he’d been in on Garth’s boat.

Dean opened the refrigerator and peered in, “we have food,” he said.

“The bread’s mouldy Dean.”

Dean hummed in derision and grabbed out the loaf of bread, the cheese and the deli meat. Sniffed at the meat suspiciously, gagged and tossed it in the trash; raising an eyebrow, that asked silently if Sam had seen that? He, Dean Winchester, had just tossed something in the trash, like his bitch of a little brother had been harping on about.

Dean banged the cast iron skillet onto the element, switched it on. Hacked off the end of the loaf, removing the lion’s share of green. Cut two thick slices and pared off the remaining bits of mold, lathered the bread liberally with butter, slapped the cheese between it and tossed the lot into the frying pan.

“Grilled cheese, food of champions… an’ prophets. Might as well give the kid an apple while you’re at it, vitamins and all that shit, don’t want him getting scurvy.”

Sam sighed and pulled out the bag with two lone apples in it, chose the least worse-for-wear one for Kevin and bit into the other.

“Mmm... Hot-water in the shower room’s out,” he told his brother, between bites of rubbery apple, it didn’t seem to have much in the way of flavor, but he guessed that was to be expected after the trials. At least it didn’t taste like rotting meat.

Dean grunted acknowledgment.

“Hot waters working here though.” Sam leaned against the counter-top watching Dean flip the sandwich.

“Weird, water’s all on the same system. Maybe you were having one of those hot flushes’ you chicks get at a certain age Sammy, hear they’re a real pain in the ass.”

“Haha,” Sam rolled his eyes, “you’d know more about being a certain age than me, man.”

He turned away and filled three fresh cups with coffee from the pot. Placed one on the counter by his brother’s elbow and received a nod of thanks in reply. “Seriously though, it was like ice.”

“I’ll look at it before the food run,” Dean flipped the toasted cheese onto a plate with a flourish. Then grabbed out the carton of fried rice from the fridge, sniffed, took a cautious mouthful, nodded to himself and dumped it into the skillet to heat through.  
“You want some?” He asked and a few grains of rice flew from his mouth with the words.

Sam held up his half-eaten apple in defense. “Nah, _I’m good,_ that stuffs pretty old, Dean. You sure you should be…”

“What don’t kill you, makes you stronger.” Dean tossed him a wink and Sam shook his head in despair as he left the kitchen with Kevin’s food. He’d remind Dean he said that, if he ended up hugging the toilet bowl in a few hours, but he probably wouldn’t.  
One of life’s many injustices was Dean’s cast iron stomach.


	6. Chores

** Don’t Feed After Midnight **

Chapter 6: Chores

Dean slouched deeper in the impala’s drivers seat and leaned his elbow out the window, enjoying the breeze.

He’d left Sammy at the bunker with Kevin, gone on the supply run alone.  
Now he felt more than a little glad to be heading back, job done, back seat loaded up with grocery bags.

Not for nothing, but being unable to keep an eye on Sam and his pacemaker angel, made him edgy.

He’d had to reluctantly convince himself to go alone after checking out the water in the shower room and pronouncing that everything was peachy. His announcement seemed to spin Sam into one of his passive aggressive cleaning frenzies. He’d handed off the list of required supplies, saying he didn’t feel right about leaving Kevin alone in the bunker with Crowley, (like Crowley was going anywhere) and begged off on the trip into town, in favour of _cleaning out the refrigerator,_ pronounced that Dean didn’t need him for a trip to the store.

No amount of wheedling or mockery had budged his skinny ass from in front of the sink scrubbing things.  
Little bitch even tossed out his enchiladas, pronouncing them unfit for human consumption.

So here he was, flying solo, after spending the last hour and a half on the drive out, and in the store. Reminding himself again, that if nothing had happened in the days since the hospital, Zeke was totally up to the task of keeping Sammy ticking for an hour or two without supervision.

He _really_ wished if there had to be an angel in there, it’d been Cas. He’da been way happier if it were Cas in there, tasked with the job of keeping Sammy ticking.

But the stupid jackass had gotten himself de-graced by Metatron, and was now pretty much human. Laying low and staying off the radar of a bunch of pissed off angels.

Come to think of it, maybe Sam’s angelic pacemaker explained Sam’s whole ice shower experience— A what-do-you-call-it? Side effect, of what Zeke was doing in there, triaging Sam’s spleen or whatever.  
If that was the case, the quicker the whole incident was brushed off and Sam moved on the better. They didn’t need Sammy freaking out and tossing Zeke out before he got done.

Once Sam was all fixed up Zeke could take a hike, or better yet, the dude could assist with the search for a way to Fed-ex the god squad back upstairs. Why shouldn’t he help? It was in the guys best interest, Cas said Zeke was one of the good ones. 

Dean rubbed at the back of his neck thinking it was probably a good idea to let his brother have a bit of breathing room anyway. Sam was starting to get a touch bitchy over how he’d been hovering, watching and worrying over the probable state of Sam’s parboiled innards.  
Not that Sam knew that was what he was doing, or how close he’d been to giving up the ghost.

Dean shuddered and pushed a cassette into the Impala’s tape-deck.   
Let the familiar drumbeat to Black Sabbath’s, “Trashed” fill him up and push everything else out of his mind.

_“It really was a meeting_

_The bottle took a beating_

_The ladies of the manor_

_watched me climb into my car and_

_I was going down the track, about a hundred and five_

_They had the stop-watch rolling_

_I had the headlights blazing. I was really alive_

_And yet my mind was blowing_

_I drank a bottle of tequila and I feel real good_

_I had the tape deck roaring_

_But on the twenty-fifth lap, at the canal turn_

_I went of exploring_

_I knew I wouldn't make it, the car just wouldn't make it_

_I was turning, tires burning_

_The ground was in my sky_

_I was laughing, the bitch was trashed_

_And death was in my eye..”_

Suddenly the throaty growl of the Impala’s engine changed tone, she shuddered under him as if objecting to the song.

He laid a hand on her dash and patted her, chuckled good naturedly.

“Just a song Baby, don’t get your fan belt in a bunch, sweetheart...”

The car surged a few times, as if disagreeing with the sentiment, or arguing; then, just as he turned off the main road and onto the unpaved access road leading to the bunker, she coughed once, and her engine died.

“What the hell?”

He coasted the car over onto the verge.

“Seriously? Now?! Don’t be a bitch Darlin’, come on.” He thumped a fist against the dash and turned the key in the ignition, the engine coughed apologetically. Then suddenly, the fuel gauge which had been riding on half full plummeted to below empty.

“What the Hell?”

…ooo0ooo…

Sam stared into the refrigerator hands on hips and felt the satisfaction of a job well done.

Every surface in there was sparkling clean and sanitised.   
Dean’s science experiments with the tenacity to try passing themselves off as food had been banished to the garbage, where they belonged and that funky smell was gone as well.

A job well done.

Next he’d tackle the laundry.

The Bunker had it’s own laundry room.

Goodbye 3am Laundromat visits lugging duffles full of suspiciously blood stained clothes, goodbye running out of quarters and having to cram way to much into the one machine.  
Goodbye watching Dean try to pick up exhausted looking women wearing sensible shoes and far too much makeup. 

Goodbye playing 5 card stud for Cheetos and chores.

Sam stripped his bed and collected up his dirty laundry, wrinkling his nose at the rancid smell coming from the clothes he’d worn in the church, it seemed like forever ago. He stopped by his brothers room and collected up the pile of clothes which always built up on his chair. Glanced across at the bed, but decided not to go there. Dean could change his own sheets;

Then, he looked in on Kevin, only to realise the kid had been wearing the same clothes for days. He suggested Kevin might want to take a shower and change his clothes, but only got a distracted grunt by way of response.

Sam left Kevin to it. Figured he’d ask Dean to tackle the whole reeking teenager thing later, after he returned.  
Dean had the experience, and he was way better with kids. Besides, Sam remembered Dean picking him up bodily and tossed into shower, fully clothed a time or two, back when his teenaged rebellion had been at full height. Someone Kevin’s size wouldn’t stand a chance in the same position. 

Sam headed to the laundry room, filled the washer with the first load and set it going.  
Ransacked the linen cupboard for fresh sheets, remade his bed, straightened the room he was using, then turned his attention back to finding every mention of angels he could in the lore.

……

The slam of the bunker door jolted Sam out of his research.

Dean clomped down the stairs lugging armfuls of plastic shopping bags.  
He was a mess. Face sweaty and smudged with dirt, leaves and grass in his hair, grass stains on the knees of his jeans and wide circles of sweat darkening his t-shirt.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Baby died, ran outta gas if you can believe it? Coulda sworn I had half a tank, then, just like that. Bam! below empty… Sender must be on the fritz, man! Could be lookin’ at a burned out fuel pump, clogged filters, injectors…, I’ma gonna haveta pull the whole thing…” Dean stomped through the war room and library, heading for the kitchen, still bemoaning probable damage to the impala.

Sam trailed after him frowning, “you’re telling me _you_ ran the car dry?” He asked incredulously, “you?”

Dean glared at him.

“Gotta ask man... uh why’re you covered in dirt?”

“Checkin’ the fuel lines.”

“Ah,” Sam nodded, then he caught a whiff of his brother, and gagged at the stench, “you reek!”

“You try hot footing it, lugging this crap for 3 miles, an’ see how springtime fresh you smell, asshole.” Dean groused thumped the plastic carry bags down on the island bench and flexed his arms gratefully.

He yanked opened the refrigerator.

“Meanwhile you’ve been a good little Suzy Homemaker,” Dean noted, “can almost see m’ hansome face in these shelves. Good job.”

Sam felt a moment of gratification then rolled his eyes, huffing with the expected bitchiness.  
“Don’t stare too long Narcissus.”

“Who you callin’ a Sissy.”

“Dude, it’s Greek mythology! Seriously, how can you not know this stuff? He was a Laconian hunter, _also_ a massive Jerk and ‘hansome’,” he shaded his voice with mockery and made air quotes, “...broke the heart of a nymph, name of Echo,” he lectured, handing off food from the bags, to his brother. “Then Nemesis, goddess in charge of retribution against those who suffer from hubris, decided to punish him. Made him fall in love with his own reflection. Dude died sitting there staring at his own reflection in unrequited love.”

“Ha, that’s one epic case of blue balls. Seriously though, Sissy never hear of masturbation?”

Sam huffed, to cover his cough of laughter and rolled his eyes again, “and that Dean, is why you get to wash your own sheets.”

“Surely you remember the talk Sammy, masturbation is a normal, heathy, expression of sexuality, nothin’ to be ashamed of— unless you don’t clean up after yourself, an’ someone steps in it.”

Sam felt his cheeks heat, “It was one time, and I was all of 13, Dean.” He muttered mortified, head ducked so his hair covered his face.

“Tell that to Amanda Sanchez, Sammy.” Dean shook his head, face lined with a sober look of disapproval, but the amusement in his eyes made a liar of him.

Sam shoved at his brother roughly, face flaming hotter with mortification. “I was _13_ Dean… like you didn’t do some embarrassing shit at that age.”

“Sammy, Sammy, Sammy you started this, if ya can’t stand the heat, get outta the —“

From somewhere below them came a series of clattering bangs.

“What the…”

Drawing their guns, both brothers started towards the direction of the sound.

“You recon Crowley?”

They rounded the bend as another series of clattering bangs echoed through the Bunker.

Dean gestured to himself then down towards the dungeon. Lifted his chin then nodded in the direction of Kevin’s room.   
Sam nodded minutely and took the branching towards the dorms without hesitation, seeking out their prophet.


	7. Misty water colour memories

**Don’t feed after Midnight**

Chapter 7: Misty water colour memories

_“Seriously? Me, seriously? We just shared a foxhole, you and I. We beat back the Tet Offensive, outrun the --the Rape of Nanjing, together! And still you're gonna do me like this?!_

_‘…..Band of Brothers’? ‘The Pacific’? None of this means anything to you? All those motels, you never once watched HBO, not once?” _

Crowley remembered his own confusion, shock and irritation, his incredulity at how the boy had just continued, as if nothing meaningful had happened between them.

The frustration he’d felt, being unable to get Sam to see, to make him _understand._

_“‘Girls’? You're my Marnie, Moose. A-and Hannah, she just, she needs to be loved. She deserves it. Don't we all -- you, me -- we deserve to be loved. _

_I deserve to be loved! _

_…I just want to be loved.”_

_“What?” _Sam had responded, ever so eloquently, completely nonplused.

Looking back, Crowley remembered the icy wave of shock he’d felt in that moment, realising those words, those _emotions_ had come bubbling out of his mouth and his cold, dead, demonic heart.

Was that the moment he had begun to believe, that it was possible? A cure for what he was..

Crowley flinched and shifted fitfully in the hard chair the Winchester’s had him chained too, trying to distract himself.  
Memories of his experiences in the church still reverberated through his mind, like acid flashbacks; no matter how hard he’d tried to push aside, or expunge them.

_“Would it be possible, Moose...I'd like...to ask you a-a favor, Sam. Earlier, when you were confessing back there...what did you say? I only ask because, given my history...it raises the question... Where do I start...to even look for… forgiveness? I mean...”_

_“How about we start with this?”_ Sam had answered, holding out the syringe, full of blood.

And then…

He’d tilted his head to the side in submission, taken the injection as meekly as a lamb.

Almost eager…. _He’d been almost eager._

The thought of it now, made him sick to his hijacked stomach.

How weak, how pathetic, how laughably ineffectual he’d sounded, in front of his enemy….

His enemy?

Yes, damn it! His damn enemy!

Once you were a demon, you came to see people more clearly. They were useful tools; nice suits to be worn, sheep to be slaughtered or shorn.

Or, if they failed to meet those criterion, they were simply your enemies.

Yet, there had been a moment… when Abbadon had tossed Sam through the window…. Where he’d felt a touch dismayed, hadn’t he? He’d felt something akin to concern for the boy’s welfare.

_“That'll do. Undo these. I'll kill him myself.”_ He’d ordered, but that hadn’t been his real plan, had it?

No.

He’d read Carver Edlund’s trashy books; maybe that was part of the problem.

Because of those books, he’d glimpsed the events with Lucifer from a different viewpoint.

Somewhere along the line he’d come to think of the Winchester’s as more than mere walking meatsuits, or tools to be used and manipulated by older, cleverer puppet masters.

  
One was unwise to underestimate the Winchester boys, despite their humanity… 

If you did… Well, it got you tossed in the cage, exploded into black goop, or chained to a chair, didn’t it?

The Winchester’s were more than meat; they’d elevated themselves to worthy adversaries.   
Two individuals who had faced off with all and sundry, and survived. They’d earned a touch of respect.

One didn’t simply off a Winchester. That ginger scag wasn’t educated enough to realise such things.

Besides they kept an otherwise dull game interesting… and a King needed his diversions.

Maybe, there had been seeds of a plan forming as he spoke to Abbadon … something built on dissatisfaction or envy.

Demons were by very nature disloyal, fickle. Always ready to stab one in the back the moment you turned around.

What he wanted, what he _deserved,_ was more than that… something reliable, something or someone he could let down his guard around, if he so desired.  
A partner in crime. An individual capable of looking at him the way the Winchester brothers looked at each other… Not out of fear or as a rung on the infernal power ladder, but as something more…

“_Sammy...come on. I killed Benny to save you.” (Who was Benny?) “I'm willing to let this bastard and all the sons of bitches that killed mom walk, because of you. Don't you dare think that there is anything, past or present, that I would put in front of you! It has never been like that, ever! I need you to see that. I'm begging you.”_

Dean’s little declaration to Sam in the church, it was sentimental rubbish. Sappy … but it had still made him wistful. It brought to light a long repressed desire.

The seed of this idea had barely germinated in the church, it hadn’t had time to develop any kind of shape, before Abbadon upped and showed her colours, with all the gall of one of her kind.

The whore had turned on him, on her King and rightful ruler!

Laid hands on him.

Put the boot in, while he was trussed helpless.

Proving his point entirely!

He couldn’t trust anyone, especially his subjects.

No finess, no intelligence, no gratitude! That was demons for you.

But then, Samuel Winchester had appeared, and doused the scag with holy oil, set her ablaze.

For a moment there, he’d felt like one of the Winchester brother’s damsels of the week.

Weak kneed and moist. Staring up at his great big bloody hero, with his hijacked heart going pitter-pat at the broad shoulders and extravagant hair, all backlit by dramatic flame.

It had been such a cinematic moment.

He’d lost his head, in the heat of the moment. All that blood Moose had been pumping into him had made him mushy.

_“You did good back there, Moose. I'll deny it if you ever quote me, but I'm proud man.   
_ _I'm proud of you.”_

He wanted to tell himself it had all been a ploy, a scheme to get Sam to let his guard down.

A clever manipulation, nothing more. A-a left field manuver to unbalance the hunter, no different than biting him to procure that mouthful of blood for his infernal transmission.

He could almost believe that… _almost_.

But, in his black heart of hearts he knew. His pre-concecrated- blood, exemplar, demonic self would never have ever conceived of such a sentiments.

Nor perhaps, the plan that he now found himself toying with. It was a distraction from remembering how incoherent and emotional he’d been in that church. Blabbing on about shared fox holes, HBO, and trashy melodramas.  
Wanting to be loved, being _uncertain_ how to seek forgiveness?

Looking back on it now, it all made him cringe.

Instead, he now chose to contemplate the idea Abbadon’s defection had distracted him from forming.

Could he find a way to subvert and harness one of the Winchester’s for himself.  
Make it suitably compliant, subservient… _needy_. Useful.   
Get one out of the way somehow. Offer the other a lure of revenge. The books, and history told him the bereaved individual would latch onto _anything_ to cope with his loss. 

Ruby had done it for a time hadn’t she? She’d hardly been the sharpest tool in the shed.

Still, she did have a number of attributes his current meatsuit lacked. 

Why hadn’t he thought to use Dean’s little vacation in purgatory?  
Little birdies told him, Samantha had ended up shacking up with the first bird he ran across. A shrew of a veterinarian with very few redeeming qualities, by all accounts.

All because Samantha hit a stray dog, and was forced to stop running from the loss of big brother.

Would it be possible to engineer another parting of ways? Employ something similar to Ruby’s game plan and reignite Samantha’s demon blood addiction …

A sound tickled Crowley from his musings.

The sound of fluid dripping and trickling, increasing steadily in volume and tempo by the moment.

Cocking his head, Crowley looked towards the door of his chamber.

Watched dampness finger under the door and begin to spread over the floor towards the altered devils trap that held him.

Pulling at his chains, Crowley sat up straighter, flaring his nostrils.

The substance smelt like water, but of course, for something such as him, there were certain species of water best avoided.

Squirming, Crowley tested the shackles around his ankles for the thousandth time.  
Reasserted that he was held fast by the warding and the shackles, couldn’t so much as move his testoni’s off the floor.

He stopped breathing and listened intently, searching for breathing and heartbeats beyond the doors to his prison.

The Winchester’s wouldn’t be far.

But perplexingly, he heard nothing, except for the increasing trickle of water.

Clearing his throat, Crowley watched the liquid trickle closer.

“Really boys, when I asked for a drink, this wasn’t what I had in mind.  
Surely even two uncouth Neanderthals such as yourselves have a drinking glass or cup, _even a rusty tin-can_ in your possession.” He called out, voice shaded to coaxing, hoping insults would raise some sort of reaction from his captors and encourage them to show themselves.

Still nothing.

“Is this some budget form of Chinese water torture, then?” He tried once more, wondering exactly what sort of scheme the Winchester’s had cooked up to break him.

“Hate to break it to you Darlings, but the whole Chinese water torture thing… it’s a myth. Now water boarding… that’s real, and loads of fun. Doesn’t work on demons though, my kind, not strictly requiring breath and all that furore.  
Really boys I expected better!”

Still nothing.

This was completely unacceptable, Crowley fumed silently to himself.

What was the point of this game?

Where was the human touch?

The bedside manner. 

Alistair had taught Dean better than this!

It had to be One of Sam-bloody-Winchester’s attempts to keep big brother’s hands clean.

All this waiting, all this anticipation, for what?  
Some kind of damn, hands free system? And a sloppy one at that! 

Crowley bared his teeth in irritation, snarled, then spat into the oncoming tide to show his contempt.

He was Crowley, King of Hell, not some third-rate flunky. 

The water crept still closer, following the warding lines, and he tried to pull his feet away once more, but to no avail.

With a hissing breath of anticipation and a toothy grin, Crowley watched the water come.

It pooled around his hand made Italian leather shoes and wicked up the leather, to finding purchase in the stitching. 

He waited.

The pain and gouts of steam he anticipated never came.

The liquid made its way through the cervelt socks he’d imported from New Zealand and met with the flesh of a moderately successful litarary agent out of New York.

And he felt nothing! Nothing but the mild discomfort of sitting with his feet in a puddle of slightly chilly tap water.

The glob of spit floated languidly over to him like a lost puppy.   
He kicked out at it in irritation, but that simply made it adhere to the fine Italian leather of his Tesoni loafer.

From somewhere above and beyond the place he was being held, a series of clattering bangs echoed down to his ears.

Crowley flinched, lifting his eyes towards the ceiling.

“Oi, Moose, Squirrel! What the blazing hell are you up to out there.” He hollered, voice rising higher in agitation.

The only answer was another series of clattering bangs, more water, and more silence.

Finally, after 10 long minutes of growing more and more irritated by the dampness crawling it’s way up from his ruined loafers and socks. Up the legs of his cashmere Armani suit pants, towards his hijacked family jewels.

The doors to his dungeon slid open and in slunk Dean Winchester.  
Kurdish demon killing blade in hand.

“Finally!” He spat in irritation.

“What did you do?!” The neathandral demanded.

Crowley felt his eyebrows rise in surprise.

“What did I do?” he asked shifting in the chair to make the chains that bound him rattle for effect. “You’ve had me shackled down here in the dark for days, unable to so much as scratch my nose. And now you come storming down here into my fetid dungeon, and ask what _I’ve_ done?”

Dean grunted, “pretty much. Common tactic with you assholes. Flood the place, screw with the warding.”

Crowley tilted his head and rolled his eyes. “And what would that achieve here, pray-tell? Exactly nothing!” he spat, “Nothing except destroying a pair of bespoke, handmade Italian leather shoes, and these socks! They’re cervelt! Dry clean only! Do you know how much an outfit like this costs!”

“Blah blah boohoo, did his highness get his shoesies wet. Seriously? What kind of douchbag wears dry-clean-only socks? Excuse me if I don’t believe you or care.”

Dean gripped his knife tighter, stepped closer and jerked roughly at the chains holding him, making sure they were still fastened.

He grunted in puzzlement.

“Forgive me if I don’t get up.”

“You did this,” Dean kicked his boots through the water pooling around his feet. “What I wanna know is how and why.”

“Why? Don’t we all Darling?  
And why must you always blame the demon, Dean? Did you ever stop to consider it mightn’t be me, surely you know these stylish accessories put a lid on all of my considerable powers.  
Ever think that maybe, this is the work of your other visitor.”

“Kevin?”

“Kevin Tran?” Crowley asked in surprise, before he could stop himself, “the prophet is here?Interesting.”

The muscles bunched in Dean’s jaw and Crowley stopped himself from persuing further, despite his interest in the traitorous little prophet.

“No, I meant your other guest.”

“There is no other guest!” Dean barked, then glanced nervously towards the door.

More interesting.

“I assure you, there is, Dean.” He purred.

“Shut your face. If you breath a word about Zeke to Sam,” the hunter hissed “I’ll - I’ll gut you where you sit. Are we clear?!”

“And who would this _Zeke_ be Dean. A new boyfriend perhaps? Finally started batting for the other team, have we? Or is that catching? No need to be shy, I’m sure little brother is open minded. Unless that’s not it, unless this Zeke has _another_ purpose. Why Dean I’m shocked! Are you keeping secrets from little brother ag—“ 

Dean punched him in the face.

Crowley smiled up at the hunter in satisfaction, bloody toothed. Licked his lips.

“If you know what’s good for you you’ll keep your goddamn mouth shut!   
Last warning.” Dean stabbed the demon blade down into his thigh. Hard and fast. “Got that?” He gritted down into Crowleys face, jerking the blade out of the meat again.

Sparks and agony flared from the wound, forcing a scream from Crowley’s throat.

After the pain abated, Crowley blinked his eyes clear and stared up at his captor through lowered lashes, breathless and truly alive for one moment. Licked at his lips again in anticipation.

“Dean?” Sam’s voice came from a distance. Dean jerked back and glanced over his shoulder.

“Not a word, you hear me?”

Dean snarled and swung on his heel, storming out.

“… Yeah Sammy, In here. Kevin okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. Uhhh man, you won’t guess what it was…” Sam laughed a tad apologetically, “I set the washer going earlier… turns out there was a sock jammed in the drain.”

“Guess you got some cleanup to do then, bitch.”

“Crowley still secure?”

“Yeah, king of the douches is whining ‘bout how his dry clean only socks got ruined. Who knew there was such shit, talk about impractical.”

“…. Guess there’s an up side to everything huh?”

“Yeah,” Dean’s laugh echoed hollowly from above, “I’ll grab a mop, cleanup the archive room down here. Crowley’ll dry out eventually.”

Squirming in thwarted anticipation Crowley discovered that the cold and damp had reached his Derek Rose boxers, he could feel the silk beginning to warp and sag against his meat, as he sat there, _waiting_ once again.

** _“Bollocks!” _ **


	8. Everyone’s a critic

**Don’t Feed After Midnight**

Chapter 8: Everyone’s a critic

To everyone else, the word of god appears as vaguely square lumps of stone covered in ancient writing.  
Kevin knows that. He’s seen photographs. But that’s not what he sees when he looks at them; what he sees… it’s hard for him to put into words.

It’s like layers of cloud moving in the sky. Each strata at a differing height, drifting in different directions on the air currents, moving over and under each other.  
Or, is it like a bucket of writhing word snakes, sliding over, under and through each other?   
A three dimensional maze?

None of those descriptors satisfy him when he tries to put it into words. What he sees, when he stares at the word of god.

It’s disorientating, sickening; gives him migraines and something that feels like motion sickness.

But it’s also kind of beautiful, mesmerising and fascinating. It almost feels like there is an edge of addiction to it.

He is a prophet of the Lord, he sees what no one else can and despite himself, that makes him feel special.  
God never figured in his plans, all he ever wanted, as far back as he can remember, was to become the first asian-American president.   
In his most hopeful moments he can make himself believe he still might be, one day. But those moments are getting rare.

Kevin passes a hand over his dry eyes and reaches for the remaining half of the grilled cheese sandwich on the plate by his elbow, and finds it empty.

He could have sworn he hadn’t finished it yet, but then, he does tend to lose himself while he’s translating.

Instead he picks up the bottle of water and swallows down long gulping drafts, until the bottle crumples in his fist, empty.

Wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, he cradles his aching head and returns his gaze to the tablet.

Distantly he hears noise and tries to ignore it. It takes so much effort.

He misses Garth’s house boat, the silence and lack of people.

How do these people expect him to concentrate, when they’re forever interrupting and breaking his concentration?

If he can just get all these tablets translated and give the Winchester’s what they need; then _maybe_, he’ll be allowed to get his life back.  
To do that, he needs to concentrate, and he’s finding that _really_ hard with that noise going on.

Huffing out a harried breath of irritation Kevin grits his teeth. He needs space from people and all their crap, to focus and get the job done, that’s why he sent Mom away—   
Kevin stops the train of thought abruptly, but it’s too late…. He sent Mom away, it’s his fault she’s dea—

The door to his room jerks open abruptly, scaring the crap out of him.

In the doorway looms Sam Winchester, tall and lanky, gun in hand. Messy hair falling in his wide, wild eyes, as he searches Kevin’s room agitatedly.

“Kevin, stay quiet, draw a devils trap, ring it with salt, get inside.”

Kevin wipes at his eyes, “Wha—“

“Just do it!” Sam orders shortly.

Kevin climbed to his feet just as the door slammed shut again.

Sam‘s gone.

Kevin staggers to the door on rubbery legs and shoves a nearby chair against it.  
A hasty, pathetic attempt at a barrier.  
Heart hammering he finds a sharpie on the desk along with a canister of salt.  
Scrawls a devils trap on the floor, hands shaking with urgency. Rings it thickly in salt.

He snaps off the overhead light, thinking the light spilling out into the hall might draw danger. But leaves the desk lamp on, afraid to be alone in the dark.

Throwing himself inside the warding Kevin draws his knees up to his chest and curls in on himself. Realises he was whimpering, and jams his hand over his mouth to muffle it, and his unbearably loud breathing.

_Crowley is coming._

_Crowley is coming._

Heart hammering with dread, he jerks his eyes around the room in apprehension, gaze jittering between the door and the deep shadows which fill the room.  
Until, they stall on the angel tablet.

The word of god is just sitting on the desk, illuminated in the glow of the desk lamp, like it’s on display there. Sitting out in the open.

He needs to get it, protect it.

It’s his job.  
He’s the keeper of the word of god… But he just, can’t move.

…ooo0ooo…

  
Sam straightened and stretched out his spine, trying to shift the ache that has settled into his lower back from manning the mop. He stoops once more and snags the wooden handle of the galvanised bucket.  
Carries it, and the mop back to the laundry room one final time, tipping the contents down the drain with a sigh.

Wringing out the mop, he puts it and the bucket away where they came from.

He sighs again when his eyes landed on the washer, he starts shifting all the neglected, wet clothing from it into the dryer, so it wouldn’t end up forgotten and smelling funky.

  
He’s just straightening up again, when his eye is drawn to the cause of all the mess and trouble. It sat on a ledge above the laundry tub. One soggy balled up sock, surrounded by a small puddle of water.

Sam picks it up with a huff, and is about to toss it in the dryer, to be with its mate.

Except— he frowns perplexed, the sock is blue, not the usual thick utilitarian black or grey he and Dean habitually wear.

Blue, red, black and yellow.

Sam stretches it out and realises, belatedly, what he is holding.

A novelty item, one that Dean bought him, along with a waffle maker, years back.

“Look at me. Getting all Married and Shit.” Written across the blue background in yellow. 

_“They’re your somethin’ blue Sammy.”_

_“That’s for the bride, Dean!” _

_“Yeah, I know… Bitch.” _

Dean’s show of support and acceptance, for his little brother’s out of the blue, Vegas marriage to Becky Rosin. Caused by Becky’s weird obsession and a love potion, complicated by a cross roads demon with aspirations.

The marriage had been annulled before it was even consummated. Thank god!

But he’d kept the socks, because Winchester’s didn’t do gifts often, and for all that Dean hadn’t believed his brother’s head long marriage to Becky had been kosher, Dean had kind of tried to be supportive.

_“I want you to get out. I want you to have a life, become a Man of Letters, whatever. You, with a wife and kids and- and- and grandkids, till you're fat and bald and chugging Viagra, that is my perfect ending.” _

The socks signify something to Sam.

He’s never worn them, but he has carted them from place to place all these years in his duffle.

That’s where this sock ought to be right now. In his duffel. 

Holding the soggy sock in his fist, Sam makes his way back to his room.

Dragging the bag out from under his bed, he rummages through it, and finds the other half of the pair.

Pristine, and still attached to the cardboard packaging.

How had one of the pair ended up in the laundry room jammed in the washer drain?

Bizarre!

But maybe not that bizarre…

Dean!

His big brother has a unique way of showing he cares at times, especially after periods of extreme stress.

Childish pranks… like missing yogurt and suddenly cold showers.

Dean’s own unique, emotionally constipated, passive aggressive way of expressing how scared he’d been, and how relieved he is that things are going to be okay.

Nothing quite like needling his little brother, and starting a prank war. 

Sam snorts in irritation, but his mouth forms a half smile.

This calls for retaliation.

Of course, the best way to truely get back at Dean would be to ignore his hijinks.  
Then, when the Jerk least expects it, bam! One well thought out act of retribution.

Revenge was always best served cold.

In the meantime, it’ll drive Dean batshit crazy if he doesn’t react or appear to notice.

Yes, Sam decides with a smirk, not getting the anticipated rise out of little brother will drive Dean nuts.

…ooo0ooo…

Kevin lost track of how long he sat there paralysed, mesmerised by terror. Heart jack rabbiting and stomach sick with dread.   
Waiting for Crowley to stalk through the door like a hunting panther, and haul him away to some new horror.

Then, after an eternity, he heard footsteps.

He sees a shadow move in the hallway outside.

It breaks his paralysis.

Kevin springs to his feet and darts across the room to snatch up the tablet, before diving back inside the protection of his warding.  
Mere moments later the door swung open, effortlessly sliding the chair across the concrete floor.

No barrier at all.

Kevin whimpers, curling into a ball, clutching the tablet to his chest, white knuckled.

Shuts his eyes waiting for the pain to begin.

The overhead light flicks on.

“Kev?” Dean’s voice makes him open his eyes.

The older Winchester brother is standing over him, a red gasoline can in one hand, looking perplexed. “You okay kid? Why…?”

“Sam said…”

A look of comprehension lights up Dean’s handsome all-American features.

“An’ you’ve been sittin’ here all this time?”

Then, the bastard chuckled.

“False alarm kid.  
Sammy overloaded the washer, we’ve been moppin’ up for hours.” Dean moves closer, grabbing a hold of Kevin’s arm to lift him effortlessly to his feet. He ruffles Kevin’s hair like he’s a kid.

“Sammy said—“ Dean wanders over to the desk and picks up Kevin’s cellphone, “yup there ya go.  
Sam texted you the all clear. Guess he got so caught up cleanin’ up his flood, he didn’t get a chance to come tell you himself.”

Dean huffed and hands him the phone, eyeing him up and down.

“Maybe next time, keep ahold of your phone, huh?  
Still, you had the most important thing. Good job!”

Dean slapped him on the back with rough approval.

Kevin stared up at the hunter, mouth agape, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  
He’d cowered there for hours like a scared rabbit, _terrified of an overloaded washing machine?!_ Stepping back he sunk dumbly to the bed, still cradling the tablet against his chest.

“How ‘bout you take a break, you could do with a shower, fresh change of clothes. You frickin’ reek man.”

“Yeah,” Kevin agreed wearily, “Sam said something similar this morning.”

…ooo0ooo…

The records room had been a total bitch to mop up.

Making sure the damp hadn’t gotten into anything, humping all those boxes off the bottom shelves and checking for rising damp. With Crowley doing his level best to piss him off.  
Luckily Dad was right, enough Duct tape could fix just about anything, short term. 

Maybe not the shitton of boxes in 7B.

Sam talks about scanning everything, going through it all and compiling some kind of mega hunting resource which might even the odds between hunters and the monsters; and makin’ it available to everyone that needs it.

That is a project that could take years (and is one Dean dreads being bitched into helping with). Until then, last thing they need is a case of black mould and rising damp turning everything into so many boxes of soggy wheaties.

Then, when he’d finally finished up all that shit, had been about to head out, get the impala back home.   
Before some millennial skid mark found her and did something he’d have to rip their lungs out over. Sam had run across him, and started bitching on ‘bout how Kevin hadn’t showered in days.

Apparently tackling reeking kid prophets fell into his wheelhouse, just call him den-mother Dean.

  
...  
  


The last of the gas out of the can gurgled down into the Impala’s tank while Dean mused on how Kevin had looked. Like he needed a hell of a lot more than a shower. Kid needed some solid R&R … they all did!  
  


Dean slid behind the impala’s wheel and bowed his head laying a hand on the dash, in a moment of contrition.

He’d treated his girl pretty damn crappy of late, letting her run out of gas, sheish!

“Please forgive me, I know not what I do.” He rumbled the lyric, and caught himself glancing over towards the passenger seat to clock Sam’s bitchfaced reaction; big brother singing Brian Adams, to the car. But Sammy’s missed this awesome performance.

He twisted the key in the ignition.

The engine turned over, rumbling into a throaty purr.

Then the radio blared to life.

** _“… I was laughing, bitch—-“_ **

** **

The speakers shrieked the line from the Black Sabbath song he’d been listening to, before she’d stalled.

Then the player made an aborted snarling sound and promptly ate his Black Sabbath tape.

Spat pieces of shattered plastic casing and tangled magnetic ribbon guts, into his lap.

“Everyone’s a critic.” He muttered, ruefully tossing the ruined tape into the passenger seat.

The impala didn’t answer, though the rumble of her engine sounded almost smug.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys  
Please don’t forget to leave a comment or a kudos if a fic has brightened up your day, or made you feel less isolated in these trying times.  
Remember that a comment or kudos can do the same thing for the writer.


	9. Insult to injury

**Don’t Feed After Midnight**

Chapter 9: Insult to injury

Charlie Bradbury 11:19am ↩️ …

To Sam Winchester

_Hi Sam,_

_Thought I’d zap you an email, see how it’s hanging._

_And maybe ask about the whole meteor thing. You know, the one all the experts can’t explain. _

_I can’t help thinking it might have something to do with you guys._

_Were those meteors something demony, (or monstery or… Alieny? I know Dean says aliens don’t exist, that it’s just fairies making fun of the close encounters, tinfoil headgear enthusiasts … but, are we really sure on that? Like really, really sure.) _

_Were those ‘meteors’ something to do with the trials you’re doing? Did you find your prophet?_

_Did you find out what that last trial was?  
Did you actually do it Sam? Did you lock all the demons away._

_Should I be worried? Or Celebrating?_

_It’s been w-a-y to long since I’ve heard from either of you, don’t leave a girl hanging._

_I guess Dean told you about my Mom. I finally got up the courage to say goodbye, it was hard. But I know it was time. Like Dean said, I was afraid of losing her, but she was already gone. I know that._

_Anyway, no chick flick moments, right? _

_I really hope you’re doing better, Dean mightn’t say it ‘cause he’s Dean, but he worries, a lot! Don’t give him a hard time about trying to look out for you. It’s his job and the man takes that job mega serious. I know you take your job of looking out for him seriously to ;-)_

_The Force will be with you. Always._

_-Charlie_

_ ...ooo0ooo...._

“Hey,” Sam leaned against the door jam watching his brother. “Is the kitchen really the best place to do that?”

Dean looked up from a sink (filled with what smelled like gasoline) full of mysterious car parts and smirked.

“It’s the only place Sammy!”

“Got an email from Charlie.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Checking in, asked if the ‘meteor shower’ was aliens, or one of our things, I told her it was, sorta. Warned her not to say ‘yes’ to any angels that might come asking for permission.”

Dean grunted, eyes on the sink full of car parts, started scrubbing at one energetically, with a tooth brush.

“I sent her Kevin’s contacts, asked if she’d mind introducing herself and saying hi to him on occasion.” Sam continued, “I, I thought, given he can’t exactly go out and meet people… contact with someone _other than us _might do him good_.” _

_“_Yeah, agreed. Kid’s startin’ to look like Wile E Coyote at the end of a roadrunner cartoon. He needs somethin’, other than stealin’ my booze to let off steam…”

Sam opened his mouth, then thought better of it and closed it again.

Dean grunted at his reaction, mouth twitching sideways with an aborted smirk.

The kitchen lights flickered a few times, Sam looked up at them frowning, then back to Dean. Dean shrugged minutely. _‘Place is old Sam, wirings funky. We checked it for emf remember. Quit bein’ such a girl,’ it said._

“Havin’ Crowley down stairs isn’t exactly helping any.” Dean continued without addressing the lighting.

“Yeah.”

He sighed wearily in response, and started to lay the parts out on an old towel, to drain.

“Recon his Royal assiness has marinated in his own juices long enough yet?” He asked, pulling the plug, let the sink drain, with a low sucking sound.

Dean rinsed his hands and wiped them on the back of his jeans. Flipped the used toothbrush at Sam.

Sam caught it on reflex.

“Is this, is this _my_ toothbrush? It is isn’t it? Seriously Dean!?” He tossed the brush back at his brother’s head, Dean’s hand whipped out, caught it midair, easy.

Sam drew in a breath, preparing to tell his brother exactly how annoying, disgusting and incapable of understanding other people’s boundaries he was, for the ten-thousandth time.

Then stopped himself, remembering Dean _wanted_ a reaction.

Instead, he performed a nonchalant shrug and smiled at his brother sanguinely. “Guess it was time for a new one anyhow. Keep it.” He tossed it back once more.

Dean frowned down at the toothbrush in his hand.

“So, Crowley, lets do it. Let me grab something and I’ll meet you at the stairs in 5?”

…ooo0ooo…

There was a brisk rap on his door.

“Hey Kev’” Dean’s voice called, “just a heads up, you might get a call or email from a chick namea Charlie. She’s legit, a friend, helped us out with the Leviathan thing. Sam gave her your contacts…”

Kevin made himself get up from the desk and open the door.

“Are you trying to set me up?” He demanded crossing his arms in irritation, “‘Cause you know, given what happened with Channing… let’s just say, the job description of Prophet of the Lord, and dating; they’re pretty much mutually exclusive.”

Dean raised a brow and smirked down at him, running a hand through his short hair. “Charlie, she likes the ladies, and fairies… well the fairy was a chick… so yeah, no… Not a setup. Though, come to think of it, you two probably do got stuff in common.

We just figured, next time this place goes nuts an’ the lights go out— ‘case we don’t make it back one time, thought you might appreciate us figuring out a backup plan. She knows where we live, has access to a key. Maybe set up one of them fail safes…”

“Oh.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed kid.”

“No, no I’m not.”

“Sure.  
Oh, and heads up, Sam ‘n’ I are gonna visit him down stairs. Try get something useful outta him. Once he’s tapped out…”

“You’ll hold him down for me?”

“You got it!” Dean winked and grinned. “Don’t forget after, ice-cream and strippers all round, we’ll make a real party of it.”

Dean probably would to. Sometimes, Kevin still couldn’t believe this was his life. The Winchester’s were an uneasy amalgam of Tucker and Dale, from Tucker and Dale versus Evil, and Micky and Mallory Knox from Natural born killers.

“Oh yeah, before I forget,” Dean pulled a heavy duty door bolt out of his pocket and held it out. “Figured this might help you sleep better. I’ll hunt out a drill and install it later, okay?”

Kevin took the bolt, gripping it so hard his knuckles ached. The plastic of the packaging dug into the meat of his palm as he stood there looking down at it, “I…”

Dean slapped him on the shoulder and nodded once, then turned and walked away. 

Kevin closed the door and walked back to his desk with a sigh. The bolt probably wouldn’t hold up against something like Crowley for long, it was mostly symbolic. But it was better than a chair.

…ooo0ooo…

He’d over reached; foolishly thought he could goad Dean into giving him what he wanted. Instead he’d ended up with duct-tape across his mouth and a bag over his head.

In lieu of distraction from the disconcerting changes within, Crowley ended up with more intense time alone with his thoughts.

What happened to the luck of the damned? The demon king asked himself.

……..

The sound of work boots on the stairs made Crowley sit up straighter, ears pricked.

Maybe, his luck was about to turn.

Two sets of work boots, steady no nonsense tread, synchronicity of step.

Crowley waited as the steps drew closer.

The lights flicked on beyond the black fabric of his hood.

The sound of the metal doors to his dungeon being dragged open, came next.

One set of footsteps paused, in the doorway, the other set came closer.

The bag was ripped off his head and tape torn from his mouth in one action, it took a fair amount of hair with it.

“Hello —“ He began his usual greeting.

In premature response Dean slugged him in the jaw.

“Never get tired of doing that.” The Hunter enthused, grinning with bravado.

Crowley grunted in response, rolling his head sideways to look at the wall full of torture implements, anticipation rising, along with the copper bloom of blood filling his mouth from Dean’s little love tap.

“Homey. Where did you get this fantastic little treehouse?” He asked nonchalantly.

Sam ignored his question.

“Alright, here's how it's gonna go. You're giving us the name of every demon on earth, and the people they're possessing.” He demanded rudely.

“Am I?” Crowley narrowed his eyes in a show of contempt. He studied the younger Winchester, attempted to see past the warding, and trace the changes to the boys aura. “Doesn't sound like me.”

“I saw you break down, Crowley,” Samantha sniped smugly, note book and pencil at the ready, as if those words alone would make him spill.

“When I was trying to cure you, I know a part of you was human again, maybe still is,” he continued.

As if _that_ made any difference to anything.

Did the boy really expect him to put out so easily, without receiving anything in return?

“Blah, blah, boohoo.  
Done?” Crowley rolled his eyes. Bored.

“Good.   
'Cause this is what I know.   
I'm not giving you anything. Why would I? You have no leverage, darlings.  
You're not gonna close the gates of Hell, because you didn't. You're not gonna kill me, because you haven't.   
So what's left?”

_And that was the thing wasn’t it?_

“We have a few ideas.” Dean rumbled menacingly, the way he said it sent little thrills of anticipation up Crowley’s spine.

‘_Yes Dean, exactly, let’s get down to it then shall we,’ _Crowley enthused silently.

“Torture. Brilliant.  
Can't wait to see Sam in stilettos and a leather bustier, really putting the S-A-M into S&M.” He taunted, outwardly leering at the younger Winchester, hoping to enrage Dean into loosing control. To get him to break out one of the many fascinating items of hunter home décor.

“Honestly, boys. What are you gonna do to me that I don't do to myself just for kicks, every Friday night?”

And that really was the question wasn’t it? The one that made his blood sing and his borrowed heart go pitter pat in anticipation.

Sam and Dean exchanged a look, then turned

….**and bloody well walked out!**

“Have fun.” Dean taunted with a smirk.

The doors slammed shut.

The lights went out with a jaunty snap.

They left him alone, in darkness once more.

Rolling his tongue around his mouth, Crowley chased the taste of blood and blinked into the darkness moodily with a low grunt of aggravation.

….

“I have so many questions.”

A voice from behind made Crowley freeze, startled.

Not alone after all.

He tried to turn and get a view of his unexpected visitor, but the chains wouldn’t allow that, which had to be exactly what his unseen visitor intended.

Permitting an unknown to lurk behind his back was not something he, or any demon of advanced age and power considered politic.  
Appearing ruffled by circumstances however, would only signal vulnerability; it was inadvisable.

Crowley drew a breath, forcing his meat suit into a semblance of ease.

“Nice of you to visit again Zeke. It is Zeke, isn’t it?”

His unseen visitor snorted. “You can call me Zeke, if you must.”

Crowley smiled to himself. “Oh I must, friend.   
Now, if you have so many questions, perhaps you came to me for some answers,” he hazarded.

“Anything to avoid being alone with yourself, and your thoughts?” The voice parried acerbically.

“Hardly. It _is_ a relief to escape the endless paperwork, however.”

His visitor ignored his dissemble. Intimated instead. “The boy is terrified of you by the way.”

Crowley raised a brow. “The boy? You’ll have to be more specific, I terrify lots of boys. King of Hell, remember.”

“I do. I was referring to the prophet, _friend_.”

“Ahhh Kevin! Yes well. Our relationship is complicated. I admit I was forced to do certain things to the lad… But you have to understand, he forced me to it. Kevin, he deceived me, lied to me and killed several of my loyal drogues. Don’t let the doe eyes deceive you, the prophet, he’s nowhere near as Bambi-esk as he’d have you believe.”

“Who are you trying to convince your highness, me, or yourself? My kind don’t take sides. I simply state the facts.”

“Your kind?” Crowley asked. It begged the question, what exactly _was_ his visitor.

The damned warding was beyond infuriating!

What kind of threat did the entity pose to him? Had the Winchester’s enlisted it, to get the information they claimed to want?

His unseen visitor hummed in amusement, clearly enjoying itself. “My kind,” it agreed evasively.

“The Winchester’s, do they know what you are?” Crowley queried. “Do you know what _they_ are? People who help them inevitably end up dead, did they tell you that? Maybe you ought to read Carver Edlund’s books, look them up on Amazon, friend. Make sure to take note of all the bodies of allies they leave lying in their wake.”

“Is that why you are refusing to give them what they want?”

“I give them everything they want and I’ll be dead soon after. Besides, it’s the principal of the thing.”

“Yes, I know. Very dead. And afterward they will all go out for ice-cream and strippers. Dean promised the lad.”

“Lovely.” Crowley muttered in response. “Hardly an incentive, now is it?”

“But torture is?  
Ever stop to think, maybe you crave the torture as a salve for your guilty conscience.”

Crowley forced out a bark of laughter in response. “Yes, yes, demons are well known for suffering from guilty consciences.

You’re a right comedian, you are.”

Footsteps behind him, moving closer. “I’m glad you appreciate humour, Your Highness,” the voice said cheerfully from much closer.

“I do have to ask…” Now the voice seemed to come from right beside him, yet _still_ Crowley couldn’t see anything in the place where the voice emanated from. Whatever it was, it had to be inside the warding, completely unaffected.

“What kind of demon has principals?” It asked musingly. “That seems a little—,” it cleared it’s throat mockingly, “—abnormal,”

Crowley was sure he felt the warmth of breath against his meat-suit’s ear.

Unnerved, he opened his mouth set on delivering some kind of witty retort, a way to camouflaging his unease. But as he did so, quick footsteps crossed the space in front of his counterfeit throne.  
Then, the dungeon doors slid open, and banged shut.

But now, Crowley was uncertain, if he was in fact alone.


	10. Escalation

**Don’t Feed After Midnight**

Chapter 10: Escalation 

Kevin rubbed at his eyes, mind spinning as he shut the last electronic book.

He felt numb and spun out.

The Charlie person Sam and Dean had given his email address to, had sent him a link to a series of electronic books, by someone called Carver Edlund.

He’d been confused at first, the books seemed like cheap trash, not worth his time.   
Despite that, he’d kept reading, because reading anything as simple as English, after the word of God, had been such a relief.

Several chapters in, he realised the lead characters names weren’t a coincidence. The books were actually _about_ the lives of Sam and Dean Winchester.   
He’d read them all, even the sex scenes, in one head long rush; it made him feel kind of pervy, like reading someone’s diary, but he couldn’t stop himself once he got started.

The Winchester’s didn’t talk about the past, they made offhand comments and referred to things, sure. _But they never explained. _Now, finally, he had the full picture, and it was a lot to take in.

Shaking his head in bemusement Kevin wondered what kind of person this Charlie woman was, to go dumping all of _that_ on an unsuspecting stranger who actually knew the Winchester’s. Like _all of that_ was some kind of bizarre in-joke she wanted to share. Why did she think he wanted or needed to know that stuff?

Kevin turned his eyes back to the angel tablet guiltily. Realising with a start that he’d just wasted _hours_ on what amounted to pawing through the Winchester brother’s private lives, and felt a cherry red flash of shame as he dragged the tablet towards him again, across the desk.   
Stared down at the Word of God, and tried to will his mind back onto his job.   
Onto finding a way to open heaven’s gates once more, so they could send the angels back to heaven. Surely there had to be something on this rock about opening heaven’s gates, like opening gates on the demon tablet.

He picked up his iPod and fitted his earbuds, cued up his favourite playlist without looking or diverting his attention from the tablets text. Expected Dvorák’s Cello Concerto in B minor to fill his ears and relax his mind. To start washing away— or at least diluting all the stuff he’d just read, _everything_ the Winchester’s had lived through.

Instead, he was assaulted by electric guitar and drums at full volume.

Kevin clawed the earbuds from of his ears with a yelp, hastily reduced the volume and peered at the little LCD screen on his iPod in confusion.

That wasn’t, Dvorák’s Cello Concerto in B minor!

He flicked to the next track labelled, ‘Elgar - Cello Concerto in E minor,’ and pressed an ear bud to his ear, heard a tolling bell, followed by heavy base guitar and drums.

There was no confusing it, someone had come into his room, removed his music from his iPod, and replaced it with the kind of god awful music Dean listened to incessantly.

Kevin stormed out of his room, with the offending iPod trailing from his clenched fist.

…ooo0ooo…

Sam wandered back into the library and found his laptop open and on.

The screen cram-full of open web pages; his email browser, Articles on history and World War II, something on Amazon. And of course pages and pages of porn.

Dean!

He grimaced and ran a hand through his hair.   
Why couldn’t his Jerk of a brother use his own damn laptop?

Why did he have to constantly rub that _stuff_ into his face?

Dean never seemed to get that they were different.

It wasn’t like he was a monk, or a prude.

He picked up women in bars sometimes.

He watched porn sometimes.

But your sex life ought to be private, damn-it, not a spectator sport.

Especially for your own freaking brother!

Why the hell did Dean see it as his duty, or right, to constantly shove this stuff in his face; like it was some competition. Or he Dean Winchester, had to ‘educate’ and fix little Sammy.

Gritting his teeth, Sam thumped a balled fist down, hard, on the keyboard and went to close the web pages, without copping too much of an eye full. And discovered the machine was frozen.

Typical!

He went to switch it off, but nothing happened.

Seriously?!

He tried again, only to be greeted by a sudden electronic sizzling sound, a shower of sparks and a stream of thin blue smoke.

Mouth agape, wide eyed in shock, Sam jerked the laptops plug roughly from the wall socket.

Stood there, stupefied into silence, his hands hovering uselessly above his ruined laptop like a flock of startled seabirds.

…ooo0ooo…

Dean hummed Metallica as he worked, dicing onions and slicing cheese.

There was nothing like a piping hot burger, nestled hot and juicy on a freshly toasted sesame bun, bedded down in a nest of the finest melted American cheese. All topped off with a heaping helping of onions, fried just right, in a shit ton of butter, then slathered in BBQ sauce.

Not a nasty green thing in sight to ruin the perfection of all that meat and oozing, molten cheese.

No Sam in sight either, whining about the evils of cholesterol and saturated fat, or giving him woeful puppy dog eyes.

Dean flipped the meat patty onto the waiting bun with its cargo of cheesy goodness. Tipped butter-logged onions out of the skillet and added a large splurt of sauce to top it off.   
Crowned the lot triumphantly with the second bun.

Raised the of culinary work of art reverently in open palms, to his salivating mouth. A worshipper receiving communion.

Bit in ravenously, felt the hot buttery grease from the onions spill from the corners of his mouth and run down his chin.

Chewed once, twice.

Expecting a rapturous explosion of meaty goodness….

And tasted….

Nothing.

Instead of the rich meaty braised copper-iron taste of rare cooked beef, the patty was like so much tasteless rubber in his mouth.

Dean opened his lips and pushed the offending thing out of his mouth with an outraged, betrayed tongue.

It dropped to the plate with a wet splat.

Dean poked at the mess with one thick finger.

The meat patty wasn’t meat. He could see that now.

It was one of the god-awful tofu concoctions Sam periodically insisted he buy. (Which usually got left in the icebox to develop an epic case of freezer burn, before finding their true home, in the trash. Because Dean refused to cook that shit on principle and Sammy wasn’t a great one to stir his ass to cook, not if big brother was there to do it for him.)

Sam!

The little turd must have slipped one of those counterfeit abominations in with the honest to god meat products, thinking Dean wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Expected him to choke that rubbery piece of trash down without noticing.

As if!

He’d been spending all this time worrying about his kid brother, tryin’ to be nice, and how did the sneaky little Sonofabitch repay him.

By messing with a man’s meat.

Well, little brother had another thing comin’ if he thought he was gonna get a pass on this one.


	11. Resentment

**Don’t Feed After Midnight**

Chapter 11: Resentment

Dean was set on giving Sam a well deserved piece of his mind over the counterfeit meat, when he saw it.

The bunker had a series of doors that they had been unable to find keys for, jimmy or pick the locks of.   
Those doors made him edgy; locked doors with who knew what crap hidden behind, that wasn’t something any hunter worth his salt found comforting.  
He and Sam had put a lot of effort into trying to get those doors open early on, justifiably worried by the unknown zones inside their new batcave. Wary of whatever was behind them coming out to bite them in the ass, at any moment. 

But what with Abbadon, the trials, Crowley. Then Sam’s near death experience; the question of what was hidden behind door number 2 had gotten pushed into the background.   
The men of letters were dead, the bunker appeared to have been undisturbed for over 50 years before they came, if there was some freaky shit behind one of those doors, at least it appeared to be contained. Maybe they’d stumble on keys one of these days and get to check those zones out.   
But, it became less of a priority as days turned into weeks, without trouble bursting out of them.   
The locked doors had transformed gradually in Dean’s mind, from unknown threats, into landmarks. Like the pictures of dead people on the walls or the swords that sat on the shelving in the library.   
  


Until now, that was.

  
Now, one of those doors was unlocked and sitting ajar.

Dean drew his gun hastily.

Edging the door open he peered through.

Beyond was an unbranched hallway, empty and indistinguishable from any of the others. Thirty feet further on was a second door.   
One which resembled the entry door to the bunker. Bound in iron and rimmed heavily with wardings. It appeared to be a twin of that other, exterior door.   
But the thing that really sent chills racing down Dean’s spine as he advanced along the corridor; foot falls deliberate and silent, gun raised. Was that the door at the end of the hallway was also cracked open, inky shadows lurking just beyond. 

…ooo0ooo…

Kevin ran into Sam in the hallway, quite literally.   
He was coming round a corner, incensed over the sabotage of his iPod, when he bounced off the younger Winchester’s chest.  
It felt like being hit by a Mac truck. 

Collecting himself Kevin looked up and cringed.   
The muscles in the man’s jaw were bunched in fury, as were his fists. The eyes that glared out from behind his bangs made him look wild. 

It was shocking, startling. Usually, Kevin forgot how physically imposing the younger Winchester was.   
Sam Winchester had a way of fading into the background, of seeming way smaller than his brother, despite being the taller of the two Winchesters. Somehow you forgot the man was 6’ 4” and composed of solid muscle, and that he was just as strong and physically capable as his brother. 

Huffing out a breath through flared nostrils, Sam sounded like a bull ready to charge. Then, he blinked, looking down at Kevin, and seemed to wilt, or shrink. 

“Hey, Kevin… s-sorry.” He stammered.

Kevin gulped, dry mouthed with shock, he’d only ever found Sam Winchester intimidating once before.   
On that first day, when he’d stolen his Mom’s car and driven halfway across the country, been forced to steal an unassuming rucksack (which contained the word of God, the Leviathan tablet.)   
Driven by awful compulsion; sparked as he came to learn, by his activation as a prophet of god.

He’d understood none of this when Sam Winchester charged after him and tried to run him down.   
He hadn’t been the most athletic kid, but he had been fuelled by terror, and his panicked, advanced-placement brain had informed him that bobbing and weaving would be his best bet against the unhinged giant.   
He’d managed to stay just ahead of the owner of the rucksack.   
Until, a female nurse appeared out of nowhere and clotheslined him. He’d slammed to the ground and lay there hugging the rucksack to his chest, sobbing, expecting the scary man to murder him, helped by the black eyed, nightmare nurse, who demanded, “not a demon or a chopper, what the hell are you?” 

Sam had loomed over him, like a monster, glaring and breathing hard with exertion, just like now.

“Sorry Sam, I wasn’t looking where I was going.” Kevin breathed nervously, still cowered before the Hunter on reflex.

Sam’s mouth pulled sideways. “Makes two of us,” he said. Then Sam’s eyes lit up suddenly, “Did - did you…?” he began hopefully.

Kevin realised Sam thought he’d made some kind of headway with the tablet. “Ah, no, I was just… looking for Dean.” He muttered.

“You and me both,” Sam’s jaw clenched, another flash of anger brought forth the scowling giant once more, then his eyes flitted over Kevin’s face. “What did he do?” He asked in a clipped voice.

Kevin held out his iPod for Sam’s inspection.

Sam frowned.

“My music… he, he swapped it…? With his stuff…” Kevin pulled a face of distaste, remembering the 80’s metal music. 

Sam’s eyebrows rose, disappearing into his hairline. And then the man snorted.

“I didn’t know Dean could work something— so advanced…   
Sorry Kevin… I thought he was just aiming this shit at me.   
Dean, I guess you could say he’s acting out, it’s dumb, but it’s kinda what he does. He’s trying to start a prank war, usually he doesn’t involve other people, but I guess he likes you.”

“Likes me?” Kevin asked incredulously.

Sam huffed a laugh. “Yeah, he has a stupid way of showing it, but that’s Dean. He’s a jackass.”

They advanced side by side towards Dean’s room in silence. 

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“What did he do to you?”

Sams lips pursed, “he ate my yogurt, gave me an ice shower. Caused that flood the other day, used my tooth brush to scrub engine parts, filled my laptop with porn, then blew it up about 15 minutes ago.”

Kevin’s step faltered, yeah, destroying Sam’s laptop. That was a low blow.

“Dunno how he got it to throw sparks and smoke like that.” Sam mused.  
“Doesn’t matter much, it was old.” He brushed it off with effort. “Jerk knows I’ll raid his emergency cash reserve an’ get another. All this crap, it’s aimed at riling us up. Sparking retaliation, it’s a game.” 

Kevin nodded, remembering what he’d read in Edlund’s books.

“I’ve been ignoring it,” Sam continued, “maybe that’s why he’s aiming it at you now. Sorry.” He ran a harried hand through his hair.  
“He hates being ignored, drives him insane.   
When he relaxes an’ thinks I’ve let it ride. When he least expects it—“ Sam chuckled to himself… “let’s just say, I’m not going to let it go with super-gluing his hand to his beer this time.”

“You really did that?” Kevin asked, thinking of those electronic books again and struggled not to think of other things he’d read in them. Looked away nervously. 

Sam smiled at him with a nod, “I did. It was priceless. A real MasterCard moment.” 

…ooo0ooo…

Beyond the warded door the lights were off, shadows stretching forward, illuminated only by the hallway behind. Dean stepped forward and found a small alcove which led to what, on closer inspection proved to be an antique freight elevator.   
Clearing the small shadowed space of threats, Dean edged the door behind him closed, and flicked on the overhead light.   
The disused bulb flickered and sizzled, surging for a bit like there was a demon or ghost present, before settling down into a steady glow. 

The control panel in front of him looked simple enough, just two levels labelled.   
In keeping with the rest of the bunker, the elevator was controlled by an antiquated switch and lever system, instead of backlit buttons.

Stepping closer, Dean studied the elevator doors and ran an appreciative palm over the inscribed wardings. The metal felt almost warm sliding under his fingertips.   
The symbols themselves were intriguing, a complex blend of protective sigils that spanned Sumerian, Enochian, Egyptian and elements from other, more obscure cultures Dean couldn’t place. The net of wardings covered the doors, intricate and almost beautiful.

The lift, Dean supposed would explain how the Men of Letters had got some of the larger items of equipment into the bunker.   
Facing the door he hesitated, considered back tracking and getting his brother for backup before going further down the rabbit hole.   
But he rejected the thought summarily, still annoyed over the betrayal with the fake meat.   
After another moment’s hesitation, Dean flicked the switch and turned the lever.   
Waited, listening to the clunk and whir of machinery from inside the shaft.   
Watched the doors slide open, gun raised.

The open doors revealed an empty, shadowed interior.

Broken glass from a shattered lightbulb crunched underfoot as Dean stepped inside and pulled a maglite from his jacket pocket.   
He shone the torch around briefly, examining the interior, before releasing a pent up breath.   
Dean jerked the control lever to the other level. 

As the doors slid shut, he thought he caught a flicker of movement behind him in the corridor. But whatever it was, it was small and low to the ground, he shrugged it off as the doors slid shut and the cab lurched upwards.

…ooo0ooo…

‘_Inconsiderate Jerk!’_ Sam fumed as he stomped back down the stairs.

“The cars gone.” He informed Kevin with a huff, ‘_damn it Dean! Would it kill you to tell someone you’re going somewhere, or leave a note?’_

Apparently it would.  
He and Kevin had wasted nearly an hour searching for Dean, before it occurred to him to check and see if the impala was parked outside.

It wasn’t.

“He’s probably gone to that bar in Smith Centre, he’s got a thing for one of the waitresses,” he said.

Kevin shook his head, iPod still clutched in his hand, face announcing without words his own irritation at Dean and the situation.  
Sam shot the boy a conciliatory smile and held out his hand.

“Give it here, make me a list, I’ll re-upload them for you.”

“Didn’t he just kill your laptop?”

“Yeah, but we have an iPad, somewhere. Dean’s not a fan of things without buttons—“

Suddenly, the lights went out.

An alarm started bleating in the depths of the bunker, then, a heartbeat later the red emergency lighting came on.   
The light stained Kevin’s face with phantom blood as he stared up at Sam, his slanted eyes wide and panicked in the semi dark. 


	12. Rats

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please not: This chapter contains kinda gruesome mentions of animal death. You have been warned.

**Don’t feed After Midnight**

  
Chapter 12: Rats 

The doors of the freight elevator slid open into thick gloom; the sound echoed slightly, indicating to his hunter senses a large room lying beyond.  
Breath caught, Dean stepped out of the elevator both his maglite and pearl-handled Colt M1911A1 raised to scan the space.

The floor was covered in a carpet of dust and debris, unmarked by footprints.   
Like occluded cataracts, the high barred windows at the far end did almost nothing to help visualisation, covered by a heavy film of grime and cobwebs.  
The whole place looked undisturbed, like it had been shut up for a long time.

The room was long, narrow and utilitarian, a storage room or— no, a loading dock. 

A block and tackle, barn-type hoist hung down from the cobwebbed ceiling over a concrete loading ramp, it caught the beam of the maglite to throw off weird shadows, as he moved about the space.   
Moving dollies and an old style hand truck loomed out of the gloom next, caught in turn by the probing luminescence of his maglite. The equipment telegraphed the purpose of the space adequately, as did the plethora of pallets, sacks, drums and stacks of wooden packing cases that were scattered, lined up, haphazardly against the adjacent wall. 

Shining his flashlight along the wall beside the elevator, Dean found the switch and flicked it on. 

The bulbs along the ceiling sizzled and hummed into life, flooding the space with stark illumination.   
Grey skeins of cobwebs and dust drifted lazily in the stale air, while small skittering sounds heralded retreating vermin.   
Rats, spiders and dust had never made their way into the inner bunker. But this area didn’t appear not to be protected in the same way. 

Suddenly, two of the disused bulbs popped like firecrackers, one after the other; a failure caused by being snapped into use, after so long inactive.

The sound made Dean flinch, swinging his gun and torch towards them, wide eyed. But they weren’t a threat.   
He lowered his gun and pocketed the torch, turning in a slow circle.  
Now the space was lit up fully, he could see that most of the far wall was designed to open up, sliding on heavy metal runners.   
He turned in place once more, still scoping his surroundings for any hint of danger, before finally relaxing.

Walking towards the doors, foot falls weirdly loud on the concrete, Dean traversed the space.  
The doors were huge, giant slabs of iron and concrete which took up almost the entire side wall. They appeared to opened via a crank system. As strong as he was, Dean doubted his ability to move something so large all by himself (even ignoring how the doors had been immobile for over 50 years.)

He considered backtracking again, but decided to try turning the crank before calling on Sam and Kevin.

He gripped the metal and threw his weight against it, was shocked to find that the handle revolved smoothly.   
The giant doors began to edge open little by little, requiring surprisingly little muscle-power. There had to be some kind of reduction gearing system hidden inside the wall. A pretty nice feat of engineering, which he guessed made sense, the place had been built to house arcane lore and a bunch of big brained academics unaccustomed to physical labor, if Henry was an example of your average man of letters.   
  
A groan of metal on metal filled the space as he continued turning the handle.   
Slowly the doors ground and gouged their way through 50 years of built up debris, it was a low tortured sound, one which ran up his arms and spine into his skull. The reverberations making his teeth ache with the strain of translated force. It filled him with unease, but he persisted doggedly. The gap widened still further, finally letting afternoon sunlight flood in from outside.

When the gap was wide enough, he left off cranking, and slid through to look around. 

Dean turned in a circle to gain his bearings and surveyed where he’d ended up.  
This was the west side of the bunker, a portion further along than the main entrance.  
From the outside it had always appeared to be just a blank concrete wall, left uncovered by the hill the rest of the bunker was sunken in to.   
  


He looked over his shoulder to clock the liquid, glossy black and chrome lines of the impala. She glinted in the afternoon sunlight, outside the main entrance.   
He smiled to himself thoughtfully. An idea kindling.   
  


He hated leaving his girl outside, exposed to the elements or anything else that might damage her. 

Now, it looked as though that wouldn’t have to continue. The space was a bit awkwardly shaped, true. Not exactly ideal for use as a garage. He’d have to be careful edging the car round that loading ramp.   
But, the thought of his Baby finally having a home, safe and protected from the elements, it filled him with an overwhelming burst of satisfaction. 

…

It took him twenty minutes of concerted effort to clear the space, making full use of the hand truck and other equipment to shift crates, sacks and barrels. Then he used the moving dolly to drag all the crap over to the far wall. 

He’d cleared out plenty of space for his girl, and now here she sat. 

Dean grinned in deep satisfaction, taking in the sight of the impala there under the lights.

He wiped his brow, grimacing in distaste at the dust and sweat that smeared up his sleeve.  
If the angels didn’t trash the world in another one of their temper tantrums, there was a shit ton of work to do down here. 

Hands shoved deep in his pockets Dean turned back towards the doors, ready to close up.  
His trajectory took him past a wooden barrel. Looking down in passing. He staggered back a step in disgust. 

“Sonofabitch! Ugh! So gross.” He shuddered with revulsion, before peering in again.

The bottom of the barrel contained a tangle of corpses, the bodies of many many rats, some partially mummified, others stripped down to the bones. skeletonised and cannibalised. Some still looked fresh.

He’d seen something similar once before, back in Singer Salvage. When he was all of 11 years old. Thank god Sammy hadn’t been with him at the time, the kid had a tender heart. Bobby had explained it, how it must have happened. 

This barrel, like that one, must have once contained some kind of food.   
The rats had jumped in after the food, and once they’d eaten their fill, they’da discovered they couldn’t jump back out. 

No problem you’d think, they were surrounded by food.

But no water. 

The rats would have kept eating, they wouldn’t have starved, but soon enough they’d have started feeling the effects of dehydration. Eventually they’d all have died.

More rats would have come, attracted by the food, or maybe, investigating the previous rat’s deaths.   
They’da got trapped too, like their predecessors. But those rats wouldn’t have died as quick.   
In search of moisture, driven by mounting thirst, they’d have started cannibalising the corpses of their dead comrades.   
A dead body don’t hold that much moisture, and a stomach can only hold so much spoiling meat.  
Eating the dead would have just delayed the inevitable, stretched out the suffering. 

This process would have happened over and over, before the rats got it, learned to stay away from the barrel of death.   
But every generation has a couple of fools, that would disregard warnings. Some of the rat corpses looked kinda… juicy.

The thought of those creature’s lingering, gruesome deaths had horrified his younger self, haunted his dreams, with images of scrabbling paws, and desperate bloody jaws.

Years later he’d learned animals could, on rare occasions turn Casper like people, become restless spirits, after death. That’s what black dogs were.

Admittedly they’d never come across ghost rats, but still…

You’d think after all these years, all the awful sights, all the dead bodies of people and gross fuggly monsters, he’d be immune to something as grade school as the corpses, and imagined last hours, of a brace of dumb-ass rats. But the thought of leaving those rodent lost souls, just sitting there putrefying… trapping others. In the same place as his Baby… That was a hard nope. 

Skin creeping with goose flesh, Dean opened the Impala’s trunk and pulled out gasoline and salt.  
Swallowing back revulsion he dragged the barrel, with its gag inducing cargo, out of the loading bay and into open air. 

Salt and burn.

...

Dean was watching the flames and smoke climb higher, from the barrel up towards the cloud ruffled sky.  
When suddenly, the giant concrete doors to the loading dock behind him, slammed shut, like a trap.

…ooo0ooo…

Kevin looked like he was on the verge of having a meltdown.  
Sam laid a steadying hand on his shoulder. He flinched at the contact, but didn’t brush Sam off. 

“Kevin, we’ve got this, it’ll be okay.” He soothed. “Let’s just…” Sam considered the best course of action, “check the map table, try to work out what happened.” He suggested, giving the prophets shoulder another awkward pat and led the way down the hall towards the war room. 

  
Sam slid his phone out of his pocket, half thinking to call Dean, or Cas, and see if either of them had heard anything on what ever new disaster had washed up on their shores. 

Then remembered Cas was AWOL and found his phone didn’t have signal.

Kevin noticed. “No signal,” he muttered with an almost vindicated look. “We’re trapped like rats in here.   
The door, won’t unlock from the inside. Just like last-time.”   
Then his eyes widened further, dark orbs, rimmed in white, bulging in their sockets at a thought, “only thing different is that this time, the King of Hell is in here with us.” Kevin started to hyperventilate.

“Hey, hey, hey Kevin. Kevin! Slow down…” Sam soothed and rubbed the prophet’s back.  
“It’s okay. Dean’s out there, and he’ll be back. You know that! And Crowley, he’s—he’s locked down, if— if it makes you feel any better I’ll go check on him, make sure he’s not going anywhere, you can come with—“ Kevin started panting harder, his eyes horrified.

“Okay, okay! No, no, it’s fine, you stay here.” 

They reached the map table and found it inactive, not a single flashing light. 

Looking around, Sam grabbed a canister of salt and made a wide circle, set a chair in it and helped the terrified prophet to sit.   
Slid his hand under the map table, and pulled out one of the many backup guns Dean had concealed around the bunker. Checking the ammo quickly, he placed it in the prophets hands. 

“You know how to use this right?”

Kevin held the gun gingerly and nodded. 

Dean had given him a crash course after the last-time he’d been trapped in the bunker, during the lockdown. That one had been caused by the angels falling.   
They’d come back to find Kevin in a complete state, cowering behind an upturned table, attempting to defend himself from any intruders with a crossbow.   
Kevin didn’t really respond well to emergency situations, and okay, yeah, sometimes they forgot that not everyone received extensive weapons training, before entering middle school.

Sam laid a steadying hand on the prophets shoulder again.

“It’s going to be okay, Kevin. I’ll check Crowley and be right back. Okay?  
You have to relax, remember we’re in one of the safest places in the world, we’ve got plenty of supplies. And Dean will be back in no time.” 

Kevin nodded shakily in response. His breathing sounding a bit better.

“In the mean time all we have to do is sit tight.” Sam advised, before hurrying out to check the demon in the basement. 

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 598


	13. Put on the red light

** Don’t Feed After Midnight **

Chapter 13: Put on the red light

He was going over the facts, trying to tease some small recollection from his memory that might allow him to work out exactly what ‘Zeke’ was.

It had been unaffected by the dungeon’s warding, was capable of deciding whether it was visable or not; and was either an excellent guesser or possessed some form of telepathy.

And then there was the whole “My kind don’t take sides, I simply state the facts,” statement.

It was a clue, Crowley knew it. Most monsters weren’t cognizant of there even being sides, driven as they were, entirely by self interest, and the drive to survive and procreate.

Neutrality was distinct from apathy, ignorance, or indifference. This Zeke individual, had declared neutrality… and that, well, that was unusual and smelled almost political.

Crowley was going through the list of entities he considered evolved enough for such a mind set, when an alarm started braying, and low wattage emergency lighting flickered on, lighting everything a lurid, bloody red. 

The aesthetics of the lighting and shrieks of alarms were pleasantly homey, true, but they also signified some kind of new drama in the offing. What were coiff and boff up to now? 

Boot steps on metal stairs.

What a surprise, something new had gone wrong and apparently, he was once again deemed to be the cause. 

It would be flattering, if it wasn’t all so banal and irritating.

Well, two could play the game.

“🎶Roxanne,  
You don't have to put on the red light,  
Those days are over,  
You don't have to sell your body to the night🎵.”

Crowley crooned the lyrics of The Police song, slyly, knowing it would rile Dean up.

Besides he’d often wondered if Dean had ever been hardup enough to try his hand at the oldest profession.

Fergus had been forced to stoop to such things, just to eat or win favours at times, as a lad.

Why not Dean Winchester? He was significantly more attractive than Rowena Macleod’s son had ever been, (those lips, those almost feminine features. His aggressive heterosexuality often struck Crowley as a defense mechanism. Maybe it was the reason the lady protesteth so much) Winchester senior had dumped Deano with little brother for months at a time. Monster hunts ran over, money ran out. Little brothers still needed feeding. 

  
“🎵Roxanne  
You don't have to wear that dress tonight,  
walk the streets for money.  
You don't care if it's wrong or if it's right.🎶”

There was only one set of footsteps. Maybe if he played his cards right, Dean might _punish_ him, for whatever infraction they were laying at his door.

The footsteps paused outside his boudoir and a very Moose-like huff was heard before the doors slid open.

Not Dean, bugger!

“🎵Ohhh Sam,” Crowley modified the lyrics on the fly, as the younger Winchester walked in.  
“🎶You don't have to put on the red light,  
O-hh Sam,  
You don't have to put on the red light,

put on the red light,  
(O-h Sam) put on the red light,  
(O-h Sam) put on the red light,  
(O-h Sam) put on the red light,  
(O-h Sam) put on the red light,  
Oh!🎵”

Samantha scowled at his serenade, “Very funny, Crowley.”

“🎶O-hh Sam,  
You don't have to put on the red light,  
Those days are over,  
You don't have to sell your body to the night.🎵”

There was a betting pool round the office, on what Lucifer had done with young Samuel, in the cage for all that time.

Was that a flush of shame, or was it just the lighting? Crowley couldn’t tell. The narrowed eyes and bulging muscles in the hunters jaw were easier to decern.

Crowley smiled up from his chair knowingly, “Red lights… All that time in the cage… you’ll forgive me for wondering, if maybe you’d be up for a career change.” He tilted his head, dragging his eyes up and down Sam’s body slowly and leered.

“I hear you are quite popular with a certain demographic. I’m sure you and big brother would do very well.”

“Just shut it, Crowley!” Moose snapped.

The emergency lighting fluctuated, as if affected by Moose’s temper.

Again, Crowley found himself contemplating the younger Winchester, something was off in the boy’s aura. Had Moose fallen off the wagon?

“This wasn’t you.” Sam stated after a moment of mutual observation.

“Define, this.” He invited, with an aborted gesture, brought up short by the blasted manicals. If he could just get Sam to take a few steps forward, inside the warding, he should be able to work it out.

Sam didn’t budge. “The Bunker, it’s in lockdown, lasttime that happened, Metatron threw the angels out of heaven and locked all its doors.”

“Let me out of here, I can help. I don’t want that bunch of winged monkeys on earth any more than you do!”

“Yeah,” Sam huffed, “not a chance Crowley.”

“Ever hear, ‘the enemy of my enemy—“

Sam laughed cynically. “You’re never going to be my friend, Crowley. You’re a scorpion, you know it, and I know it.”

With that last slight Sam turned on his boot heel and strode out, sliding the doors decisively shut behind him.

…ooo0ooo…

It took Dean a while to work out what had happened.

The doors to the loading dock had snapped shut like a trap.

After pointlessly trying to find some external mechanism to reopen the loadingdock doors, Dean made his way round to the main door.

Only to pat his pockets and realise that he’d left his keys hanging from the Impala’s trunk.

They were locked inside the bunker.

It wasn’t until after he’d messed up his knuckles, banging on the door that he remembered how utterly impenetrable their new bat cave was, and steeled himself to the unpalatable idea of calling Sam and asking to be let back in.

It was then he discovered, his phone had absolutely no service.

It may have taken him longer than he wanted to admit, to make the connection between the way the loading dock doors had slammed shut like a clam and the lack of cell service; to remember what Kevin had said about the bunker door not opening from the inside when the angels fell.

They’d found four keys to the bunker, one was on his keyring- which was currently hanging from the impala‘s trunk.

Sam had one in his wallet. Kevin had the original, that came in the nifty wooden men of letters box, which Abbadon had chased after Henry and killed him for.

Those three keys were locked inside the bunker, behind concrete and inch thick iron plate.

The last key was sitting in a P.O Box in the Lebanon post office, part of a new ‘incase of emergency’ plan, they had yet to finish setting up.

The system would send out an email to Garth and Charlie, give them instructions on how to find and access the bunker if they failed to reset it. Something similar to the email Kevin had used to tip them off after Crowley abducted him from Garth’s boat.

Dean checked his watch, the post office proper was only open 7:30-11:30am on weekdays and for like an hour, Saturday morning. Podunk one horse town! Thankfully the P.O Boxes were open 24/7. It was gonna be good couple of hours walk.

“Awesome!”

…ooo0ooo…

“Hey, Crowley’s still secure.”

“Are you sure?” Kevin asked, his hands still white knuckling the gun.

“Yeah. Just relax, Dean will be back by morning. We are safer here than anywhere.

Either it’s something out there. Or something mechanical in here is on the fritz. Dean’ll sort it.”

Kevin held out the gun and climbed to his feet. Trailed him on the way to the machine room.

“First things first, I’m gonna work out how to turn off the alarms. If nothing else, we can cut the wires to the sirens.”

Kevin looked up at that, face dumbfounded, “seriously? That would work? Why didn’t I think of that, lasttime.”

Sam patted the prophet on the shoulder in consolation, “what can I say Kevin, that’s the difference between being smart, and being experienced. Come on, I’ll teach you.”

…ooo0ooo…

“When he called you a scorpion, Sam Winchester was thinking of Aesop’s fable, the one with the scorpion and the frog.”

Crowley flinched at the voice.

Again with his unseen tormentor?!

“Zeke, you really should stop listening at keyholes, you know what they say.” Crowley parried, covering an atypical prickle of hurt at the dig.

Surely Sam understood by now, that he might be a demon, but he wasn’t so hellbent on distruction as to sink the effing boat! Hadn’t he helped rid the world of Dick Roman and cleared out the rest of the Leviathan. Didn’t he help put Lucifer back in his cage? Seriously? Talk about complete ingratitude!

“If it’s Aesop’s fables you want to discuss, how about we turn our attention to ‘The bats, the birds and the beasts.’ Something tells me it might strike a chord.”

“Hmmm, indeed,” Zeke acknowledged, “neutrality has it’s burdens. But it also has compensations.”

“Samantha isn’t aware of your presence here.”

“Astute deduction. It would be unwise to mention the name ‘Zeke’ to him. I have to warn you, Dean doesn’t want his younger brother to know how close to Death those demon trials pushed him. He wasn’t lying about gutting you.”

“And you?”

“I thought we had established, my kind is Switzerland.”

“Hardly! You’re helping the Winchester’s, if you were truly neutral you’d help me as well.”

“I am helping you. Helping you along your road to self discovery. Shall we talk about how you felt, when Sam Winchester announced you would never be friends?”

“That’s not what I want, and you damn well know!” Crowley bellowed, fury escaping his control.

Zeke was completely unphased by the outburst.

“Yes,” he agreed unflappable, tone so reasonable it made Crowley want to vomit, or disembowel something.

“Meanwhile, Dean Winchester doesn’t want to eat less animal protein or get more exercise. People so rarely want what they actually need.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments, criticisms, Kudos and questions all welcome 
> 
> 643


	14. I would walk five hundred miles

** Don’t Feed After Midnight **

Chapter 14: I would walk five hundred miles

Lebanon Kansas, a blink and you’ll miss it place; whose only public claim to fame was that it had once been the geographic center, of the entire United States. Heart of America’s Heartland.

Sammy told him how they’d worked it out, back in 1918, in a scientific survey (which actually meant they made a cardboard cutout of a map of the country and stuck a pin in it, shifting it about ‘til they got the thing to balance and spin properly.) The geographic center of the 48 contiguous US states was about 3 miles northwest of Lebanon, Kansas.

They’d erected a monument and everything, out on the other side of town; but not _exactly_ where the pin was, ‘cause the farmer who owned the land didn’t want a monument and a bunch of tourists in the middle of his field, but hey, the site was close enough for government work.

Tourists still came, stood by the monument, took their photos and moved on.

Back when the Men of Letters were looking to build their bunker, as a top-secret storehouse for all that lore and arcane crap, the population had been three times what it was now. The whole thing must have appealed to that bunch of fez wearing, book club dudes. To build there in the geographic center of the 48 contiguous US states.

Then, times changed, Hawaii and Alaska joined the union and the actual center moved away.

Dean trudged along the empty ribbon of blacktop,

through the vast flat expanse of wheat fields and farms, thinking on what Sam had read to him. Politicians dubbed Kansas the breadbasket of America.

He wiped sweat from his brow and stared out at a waving sea of wheat, clocking the sun’s progress in the sky. It was hard to gauge things out here, the undulating flatness of the land, how the scenery seemed to consist of endlessly repeating of more of the same. It made you lose track, feel like you were walking on a treadmill.

That article had talked about how high intensity farming and mechanization were killing little burgs like Lebanon.

Farms got bigger, required less people to work ‘em, the young folk left to find work in the cities, attrition happened. 

There used to be a motel, middle school, sit down restaurant and movie theater in Lebanon, one playing flicks made in the same actual decade.

But they were long gone before he and Sammy came trolling through town in the impala, looking for a lock to fit Henry’s key. Four months ago, now.

Nowadays, Lebanon Kansas boasted a population of just 250 odd souls, and not a single one of them was out and about.

Which left him stuck, hoofing it, walking down empty black top, following a series of roads that no one cared enough about to bother naming. They’d given all the roads round this part a series of numbers or letters depending if they went north-south or east-west, and said, ‘good enough.’ 

The only decent one of the lot being four down the list, Dd road_, ‘double D’s Sammy!’ _

The center of town, and the post office on Main, was a good two hours walk from the bunker and Dean had given up any hope of seeing one of the good ol’ boy, local farmers or one of their too young to flee yokel kids, trolling along in a ubiquitous pickup truck or tractor.

Harvest was more than a month away, now was a waiting period, the calm before the chaos of harvest. 

By the time he finally caught sight of the Midway co-op grain elevator, Dean was feeling decidedly worse for wear. He was parched, starving and his feet hurt. He’d been sweaty and covered in dust from clearing out the loading dock before, not to mention the lingering smell of Eau de incinerated rodent corpse. But, adding two hours of walking into the mix really hadn’t increased his street appeal any.

The sight of Main Street’s small cluster of red brick buildings had never looked so good.

Without sparing a glance for the Post office, closed for the day, hours ago, (barring the P.O Boxes in the lobby.) Dean made a bee line for LaDow’s Market. 

LaDow’s was a kind of one stop shop, there was a section of kitschy souvenirs and T.shirts for the center tourists, grocery items, fresh produce, basic hardware, and round midday, week days, the owner’s wife and daughter served a basic lunch menu.

Dean strode inside, making the bell over the doorway jingle and headed straight for the back.

Pulled open the cooler and grabbed up the first cold thing he saw, cracked the top and quaffed half of it standing there.

“Looks like you needed that.” Randall LaDow, (who everyone called Lori for some reason) observed from behind the register.

“You have no idea.” Dean grunted in response. 

Lori was the owner-operator of LaDow’s Market, a hale man in his late fifties, with receding iron grey hair, a paunch and wire rimmed glasses. 

According to Gladys Kennedy, the towns unofficial historian, Lori’s family had run the Market for generations.

Dean eyed the empty lunch counter and its attendant brown vinyl booths regretfully, his gut clenching.

“Man, I missed lunch.”

“You did, by all of four hours. Dana made a blueberry-apple pie.”

“Seriously? Man! You’re killin’ me here.”

Lori laughed, “I’m guessing you’d be interested in that last slice I had set aside.”

“Nahh,” Dean held up a hand. “Guessin’ you set that aside for yourself. Couldn’t steal another man’s pie.”  
His stomach chose that moment to let out a loud grumbling growl of complaint.

Lori pulled the white takeout container out from under the counter and laid it by the till.

“You’d be doing me a favor Mr Campbell, Dana’s been on at me about my cholesterol again.”

“I feel for you, man. Daughters and brothers, they’re a raging pain in the ass. Sammy keeps tryin’ to slip me these tofu hippy monstrosities, same reason.  
Like I can’t tell the difference between grass fed Kansas beef and that godawful rubberized crap.   
A man needs his meat, you don’t mess with a man’s meat.” He muttered, grabbing a second soda and a pack of jerky, to join the white takeout container by the register.

“You have car trouble?” The old man asked ringing up his purchases, “didn’t hear that Chevy of yours.”

“Yeah, but not in the way you think, my brothers got the car.”

Lori eyed him up and down, taking in his appearance speculatively and nodded without saying a word, took off his wire-rimmed glasses polishing them slowly on his shop apron.

Dean dropped a twenty to the counter.

“You two have some kind of spat. That brother of yours hasn’t had a relapse, has he?” He asked finally, as he made change and bagged everything.

There was something in the way the old man said it, that hinted at judgmental speculation and raised Dean’s hackles.

_Did he think Sam was some kind of recovering addict? _

Well, Dean guessed with an internal shrug, he kinda was… but still…

“Sam’s doin’ fine.” 

“Good to hear.” Lori nodded serenely giving him a pitying smile.

Dean grabbed up the takeout container and plastic fork from the bag.

Forked up a large mouthful of pie, to end the conversation and take the sour taste out of his mouth. 

The taste of the fruit and buttery pastry exploded over his taste-buds, driving every other thought from his mind. It dragged a low groan of appreciation from his throat and another loud gurgle from his midsection.

“Damn that’s good. Tell Dana the marriage offer’s still open.”

Lori chuckled and shook his head. “Think her husband might have something to say, ‘bout that.”

Dean shrugged ruefully. “Never hurts for a lady, or her husband either, to know she’s got admirers.” 

…

By the time Dean had extracted himself from Lori LaDow and made his way back down Main Street, his brain was ticking over, and a feeling of urgency had gathered in his sated guts.

It had suddenly occurred to him, that maybe, the random unlocked door in the bunker, finding the loading dock, and the bunkers lock down ~ all of it, mightn’t have been so random, so external.

That, maybe, he’d been wrong about Crowley being neutered and rendered harmless by the dungeon and its shackles.

The bunker contained everything the Men of Letters had wanted to keep out of the hands of the evil sonofabitches of the world.

Larry Ganem told them to toss the key in and walk away, that it was better to lose access to all of it, rather than have any of it fall into Abbadon’s hands. Abbadon had seen the coordinates of the bunker and was out there doing god knew what.

But who said Abbadon was the only demon they needed to worry about? Crowley was the King of Hell! He’d gotten to Kevin on Garth’s boat, despite all the warding.

If there was one thing they knew about Crowley, it was that he was always looking for more power.

All that lore, the angel and demon tablets, _a prophet, _and Sam_ … they were all locked in the bunker together with that slimy sonofabitch_.

Dean needed to get back, get inside. For that, he needed to get that key.

The key to the P.O. Box where the last accessible bunker key lay, was on his key-ring. Hanging from the Impala’s trunk, inside the bunker, behind a butt load of iron and concrete.

If Lebanon hadn’t been such a backwater, the post office would’ve still been open, he would have charmed Martha into opening the box for him, 2 minutes straight, no issues.

But Martha locked up shop at midday.

He had his lock picks, but there was a wrinkle, in that the Lebanon P.O. Box lobby had a couple of cameras.

They were going to be a problem.

Like everything else in Lebanon, the camera system was ancient, hadn't been updated since the 1980’s. The footage wasn’t online or even digital. There’d be no hacking or wiping it later.

The system consisted of cameras, a recorder, a bunch of VCR tapes and a grainy monitor. It was the sort of surveillance that only captured picture a couple of times a second, but that would be enough for someone to realize he wasn’t using a key.

Yanking the wires on the cameras before breaking into their box would only incriminate him, add property damage to his wrap sheet. 

Be better to go in there, pick the lock on the postbox and hope no one walked in on him, or checked the camera footage until it got over written.

He could do his thing, break into the office out back and nab the tapes. 

If this were a case that’s exactly what he’d do.

But Lebanon was their back yard, people knew them here, and as Bobby used to say, “you gotta keep your nose clean in your own hometown, boy.” It didn’t matter if they did skivvy things on a case, they were Rolling Stones, rarely visiting the same town twice.

The answer to his conundrum came in the shape of an ancient fuse box, attached to the outside of the little brick and clapboard post office.

Knock out the power to the building and you’d knock out the cameras and VCR recorder inside.

Dean rolled his eyes, little backwater towns like Lebanon weren’t set up to combat career criminals, the people here just weren’t psychologically equipped for it. Not that any career criminal would bother robbing post office boxes in a dead-end town like Lebanon. None excepting a certain individual by the name of Dean Winchester.

Looking around to check no one was watching, Dean ambled down the alleyway beside the post office and flipped open the fuse box.

Just as he was working out which fuse to pop there was a sound behind him.

Guiltily, he spun, ready to face one of the good ol’ Kansas boys, who’d be demanding to know exactly what he thought he was doing.

Instead, a mangy looking ginger cat came streaking down the alleyway, stepping hastily out of the path of the ginger allergy factory, Dean caught his boot heel on a clump of straggly weeds.

“Sonofabitch!”

He fell on his ass, in the dirt.

Scrambling hastily to his feet, Dean glanced around, mortified, glad Sammy hadn’t been there, to laugh his ass off.

Heart thumping with cat induced adrenaline, he turned back to the fuse box and popped out the necessary fuses.

Flipping the panel closed he did his best to saunter nonchalantly back towards the P.O. Box lobby.

Sammy was way better at picking locks! not that Dean would admit it, but he gave Sam the job on cases for a reason.

Now, he found he was out of practice. It felt like it took him hours to jimmy the lock.

When finally, the little door popped open Dean pumped his fist, spinning on his heel in a victory lap of sorts, only to see the door behind him, into the post office, swing open.

Eyes wide, Dean stared at Gladys Kennedy and Martha Gilbert like a deer in the headlights, for one long moment.

Shoving the lock-picks belatedly into his jacket pocket Dean fixed a smile on his face that felt like a grimace.

“Ladies,” he greeted cordially, grabbing up the little plastic key container from the roof of the mailbox, held by magnets, and a fistful if mail.

“Oh, Mr Campbell, apologies if we startled you.” Martha fluttered, “we seem to be experiencing a power outage,”

“LaDows still has electricity.” Gladys Kennedy noted, peering out of the glassed in street door of the lobby and down the street.

“Oh,” Martha cooed looking uncertain, “I suppose I should call an electrician to look at it then.”

Gladys lifted a bony wrist to peer at her watch. “If you call Stewart at this hour he’ll not answer. That man will be down at Donny’s bar swilling away his wages. I’m afraid that it will have to wait until the morning, dear.”

“Ohh!” Martha looked stricken, perhaps worried over what the town council would say, should the post office not open on time next morning.

“Maybe I can be of service,” Dean suggested, “I may not be an electrician, but I can certainly check the basics.”

“Oh! would you?” Martha breathed eyeing him with excessive gratitude.

“It would be my pleasure.” He bowed, slightly favoring both ladies with a bright smile.

After a ‘search’ for the fuse box, (that allowed Dean to reassure himself the video surveillance equipment didn’t have a battery backup) they ‘found’ it, located on the outer wall.

Dean then made a show, and short work of popping the fuses back into place.

Both ladies hailed him as a hero and a Good Samaritan, pledging their undying gratitude. Something that might have been more appealing if Gladys weren’t in her eighties and Martha in her mid forties and married.

It was after that, as Dean was readying himself for the trek back to the bunker when both ladies noticed his lack of wheels, and insisted upon dropping him back to the foreclosed, abandoned property (only a few miles from the access road to the bunker) that he claimed to have been surveying for a client, before a disagreement with little brother, ending with him car less and walking into Lebanon to calm down. 

It wasn’t his best work, but the story would give the old dears something to titter and speculate over during their monthly quilting session in the Centennial Hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The places in the art work are based on actual photographs I found on line of the real Lebanon Kansas.  
My research indicates that Lebanon Kansas is much smaller than the Supernatural writers have made it out to be, it doesn't have a liquor store, pizza place, school or movie theater. Attrition is real, but Dabb obviously chose to ignore it.  
I did base places and some characters on actual businesses and individuals living in the town, there people were interviewed or spoken about in the various publications about the town, I read while writing this chapter.  
I have never met or talked to any of these people, any events, views or personalities shown within this story are entirely of my own fabrication.  
As always thank you for reading and I would love to hear from you.  
-MC2  
675


	15. Things fall apart

** Don’t Feed After Midnight **

Chapter 15: Things fall apart

They were in the kitchen, Sam half heartedly stirring at a saucepan of Spaghetti O’s on a camp stove, and Kevin pouring out two glasses of OJ, when the Bunker door opened.

“Sam! Sammy!” Dean’s voice barked in full on command mode, as the lighting and everything else in the bunker reset.

“Dean!” Sam called in response. Playing their own personal spin on Marco Polo made a huff of relief escape, glad Dean was back so soon.  
“In the kitchen.”

The Dean that strode into the kitchen didn’t look how Sam expected.  
He was sweat stained, dusty and stank to high heaven, and not in a, ‘I finally charmed my way into Angela’s bed,’ kind of way.

“What happened to you?”

“Walked into town to save your ass.” Dean grunted, “you _did_ know the Bunker was in lockdown?”

“Yeah, we knew.” Sam shared an eye roll with Kevin, “You run out of gas again?”

“No!   
So wait, everything’s okay? Crowley isn’t…”

“Worst thing _he’s_ been up to is singing hits from the 70’s.  
Out there?”

“Nothing, according to the ‘net. Called a couple other hunters, nada and bupkis.”

“Huh! Weird.”

“Speakin of weird, gotta show you somethin’.” Dean turned, gesturing for them to follow.

Sam and Kevin traipsed after, through hallways, until they came to one of ‘the doors’.

Had they told Kevin about the locked doors? Sam couldn’t remember, but what ever Dean’s crackpot scheme was, Kevin had better things to do than waste hours trying to open one of them like he and Dean had.

Sam was just opening his mouth to dissuade his brother, when Dean turned the handle and swung the door wide open.

“You did it?” Sam asked, inwardly a touch annoyed.  
He was better with locks than Dean. He’d been _so sure_, if either of them was going to crack one, it’d be him.

Dean and Kevin were already through the door; his brother bitching to the boy about how much time they’d sunk into trying to open the locked doors, _only to walk by and find it randomly open._

“Maybe it unlocked when the bunker locked down then reset, after the angels fell?” Kevin suggested.

Dean caught Sam’s eye over Kevin’s head, silently asking if Kevin’s theory held water.

“It’s possible.”

“Hmm. Better check the others.”

Down the corridor from the unlocked door, they came to another door, one that resembled the bunker’s front entrance.

“Is that—?”

“Yeah.” Dean tried the handle, found it locked then pulled out a bunker key and unlocked it.

It opened with a familiar ponderous creaking thunk, one that sounded just like the other outer door.

Beyond the door was another short hallway terminated by a pair of large, metal sliding doors. 

“Freight elevator, warded up the ass.”

Kevin stepped forward to run his hands over the embossed metal doors with a whistle.

Behind the doors the elevator rumbled in its shaft, called up by a lever Dean turned.

“These … these symbols they’re not like anything I’ve ever seen,” Kevin said quietly, hand moving over the metal, “they look like a combination. I didn’t even know you could do that—“

Sam stepped in closer and peered over Kevin’s head, fumbled in his pocket for his phone to take photos of the warding.

“It’s almost like, who ever did this, mixed half a dozen symbols, from half a dozen different warding systems and distilled them down to their base essence...”

Kevin looked back at him over his shoulder and nodded in excited agreement.

“Yeah,” Dean brushed them both aside, “trust you two geeks to go creamin’ your panties over the damn _elevator door_.”

The doors pulled back, opening into an unlit cab.

“Need to replace the bulb.” Dean muttered and pulled a maglite from his jacket pocket, clicking it on.

Sam peered into the metal box and felt his heart rate ratchet up a notch. Since the cage, the return of his soul and his cage memories, he’d struggled with enclosed spaces.

Mostly it wasn’t an issue. He could push through.

But there was something about the lack of lighting in there, and the weird warding on the doors that made him reluctant to enter, despite his curiosity.

Dean must have noticed his nerves. “Seriously?” He asked, then jumped up and down heavily inside the cab, broken glass crunching under his boots.

“It’s a _freight_ elevator Sammy, it’s built to carry a ton, the Men of Letters made stuff to last.  
You look like you’re worried the cables gonna snap.” He scoffed.

“And now _I’m_ worried the cables gonna snap, thanks Dean.” Kevin muttered darkly, stepping into the cab, and sidled up close to the wall.

Reluctantly Sam stepped into the elevator cab behind Kevin and fixed his eyes on the beam of Dean’s maglite to steady himself; only to have his gut twist as the doors slid shut. His traitorous mind chose that moment to dredge up a memory of Lucifer’s wings raised above him in a smothering canopy, aflame with angelic grace.

_All that awful, twisted radiance and the way it had seared into his very soul... _

_God! How bad that light had made him wish for the darkness, despite darkness meaning he didn’t know exactly how close Lucifer was, or what he was going to do next..._

Sam bit down, hard, on the inside of his cheek as the cab lurched upwards. Felt pain and tasted the copper bloom blood on his tongue, fought to control his panic.  
Counted his thudding heartbeats.

The elevator reached its stop, the doors slid open and light spilled in from outside.

Dean was yammering on about something, but Sam couldn’t follow his words.

He stepped out of the elevator quickly, looking around, heart thudding like a trapped thing, inside of the meat and bone cage of his ribs.

The elevator had taken them up to a large storage area filled with old junk, there were crates and barrels everywhere, a sloped ramp and a chain hoist hanging from the cob-webbed ceiling.

Incongruously, the impala sat in the middle of the space. Seemingly the only object untouched by the smothering layer of dust, and the march of time.

The sight of the car sitting there under the lights; it settled the frantic nervous thing crouching inside his chest.

He took a deep breath and stepped towards the impala, felt something shift under his boot.

Lifting his foot, Sam looked down to see a shiny silver hex nut.

It seemed out of place on the dusty, debris strewn floor, shiny silver against the dirty concrete, untouched by rust.

Bending down he picked it up, eyes trailing to another silvery object further on, this one a screw.

Sam’s eyes tracked a dot dash line of small silver objects.

While his eyes traced the shape made by the trail Dean stepped up to the impala and yanked his keys from where they hung, in the Impala’s trunk.

What happened next seemed to happen in slow motion.

First the car’s rear number plate swung lazily to one side. It broke lose entirely moments later and clanged loudly onto the floor.

The rear bumper followed.

Then, things seemed to speed up.

  
Suddenly, the storage room was filled with noise, dead air split by the clash and clang of metal cascading onto concrete.

The car’s doors lurched open next, teetered, then fell from their hinges with synchronous squeals and thumps.

Dean lunged forward, to catch the closest one in his arms.  
He clutched it against his chest in a kind of dumbfounded shock, as the Impala’s hood popped open, and _catapulted_ off the car with an almost cartoonish spronging sound.  
It launched six feet into the air, and landed on a pile of dirty sacks, kicking up a thick cloud of dust.

One of the glossy black side panels went next, slanting away from the cars frame, to tumble from the Impala’s body like a petal falling from a dying bloom.

Kevin jumped back, out of the path of a wheel. It bounced once then rolled away from the car, across the concrete floor and hit the far wall, before falling on its side, revolving on its rim and coming to stop.

One of the cars headlights popped free of its housing to swing almost grotesquely from the wires, reminiscent of an avulsed eye. 

Dean just stood there, arms wrapped around the door he’d saved. He swayed slightly on his feet, a long pained sound emanating from his slack jawed mouth.

…

Within a minute it all stopped. Silence fell.

Slowly, Dean lowered the door to the ground. Leaned it carefully against a nearby concrete pillar.

He crouched then, slump kneed in the dust to retrieve a wing mirror.

Stayed that way for a long time. Hands smoothing restlessly back and forth over the stem that had attached it to the Impala’s body.

Finally, Sam shook off his own shock.  
Stepped closer to where his brother was crouched, “Dean?”

Dean swung hastily to face him, a feral look on his face like he’d worn after he returned from purgatory, plastered on his face. Eyes flat and filled with an almost absent vitriol, lips drawn back to bare his teeth, a soundless snarl.

Sam stopped dead, found himself stepping back, hands raised. 

“Why?” Dean demanded after they’d stared at each other for a long minute of silence.

“I didn’t, I wouldn’t. D-Dean come on! Think about it, I didn’t even know where she was.”

Dean swung towards Kevin almost mechanically.  
Sam stepped between his brother and the prophet protectively. “It wasn’t _Kevin_.”

Dean frowned and laid the wing-mirror gently down on the concrete again.

Stood abruptly.

“Sonofabitch!” Dean wheeled around and stormed out, leaving Sam and the prophet of the Lord gaping in his wake. 

“Ummm, Sam? What just happened?”

“Not sure Kevin,” Sam answered distractedly, his eyes tracing over the symbol made of bolts, nuts and screws once more, “but, I’m beginning to think I was wrong about Dean being the cause of all the weird stuff that’s been happening lately.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 718


	16. A stitch in time

Don’t Feed After Midnight

Chapter 16: A stitch in time

  
**Please note this chapter is kinda gory, can’t say I didn’t warn you.**

Crowley jerked his wrists against the manacles binding him to the chair; the debilitating ache from resisting the anti-demon warding making him bare his teeth in a shark like grin.

Thanks to Sam, and all that blood he had poisoned Crowley with, he also felt a second kind of pain whilst jerking a wrist.

Call it somatic pain.

Feedback that danced zingingly outward from all those little nerve endings clustered under the frail, bruised, and abraded skin of his meatsuit.

It was a sensation the demon king hadn’t _truly_ felt for hundreds of earth-years, and he gloried in it. 

A demon invaded every cell of the meatsuit they possessed. But, what said demon experienced, even in a meatsuit, was always perceived from a step back. Muffled, and dull by comparison to what a living human felt.

Any topside demon could take a knife to the meat it inhabited.

Carve the still beating heart from it’s chest, mutilate it in any number of inventive ways, and the sensation elicited by all that creativity, could be, at best, described as _discomfort_. 

Even fully enmeshed in a meatsuit, a demon didn’t truly _feel_.

Still, demons did contrive a lot of satisfaction from causing sin, destruction and degradation. They could syphon off some secondhand emotional impact from a meatsuit’s suffering and get a nice buzz going. Which was why demon’s would scheme, claw and fight their way to the top of the pile for the chance to visit topside and have an opportunity at being inside a meatsuit. Of feeling _something_.

Because of the suspended demon cure, Crowley found he had begun to perceive physical sensation from his meatsuit more keenly.

Humans were creatures awash in a sea of sensation. Pleasure and pain, the seeking and avoidance of them, were what push-pulled your average human around it’s mortal coil.

When they died, and got sent down stairs, they were cut adrift from all of that.

Eyes, ears, taste buds and nerve endings, were all somewhat lacking when one gave up the ghost.

A spirit could sense things, true, but such sensations were diffuse, dilute; more a lingering memory of how things had been in life than true tactility.

In the beginning, when a spirit plunged down into hell, it existed in a muffled form of sensory deprivation. Left alone and starved of everything that constituted life. Tormented by the memory of, and hunger for, all those sensations they had been cut off from.

Your average new Hell recruit languished like that, a spirit with a muddied soul still attached, alone in their cell or hanging from chains in a void of their own making.

They were left there, to marinade in their darkest thoughts, regrets and memories, for a long time. Before ever seeing a demon or the racks.

Then came the racks, where the soul was painstakingly driven off and peeled away. The torment of the racks only came to an end if a spirit relinquished it’s hold on its soul, giving it up to Hell.

Leaving only the individual’s spirit, now curdled and twisted into black smoke.

While it happened, the torment of the racks appeared never ending, a sea of pain with no shores; bereft of even the hope, or promise, of death.

It was not, however, the same as pain felt whilst alive. Of course, very few suffered enough during life to notice, or comprehend how their mode of existence differed from their previous one.

A physical body suffered in graduations, it had a finite capacity to endure, before inevitably fleeing into unconsciousness or death.

A spirit in Hell had no such escape … But neither did torture in hell have any true, concrete ramifications. If you ran a metal blade through water, you did no true harm to the water, you simply forced it to take on a new shape.

Rack demons did not need to wait for their charges to heal, before beginning anew. Very few recruits retained the presence of mind to notice such, in the thick of things.

They experienced the torture as their lost bodies and years of human experience led them to expect and anticipate.

Hung on the rack, one existed in the eternal now. Soon enough, forgetting such concepts as past, present and future. But for all that, once hung on the rack, you were allowed to _feel something,_ after so long held with no external stimulus.

The experience would laser focus a recruit into an eternal moment, which in itself was a kind of clarity, the pain burned away the dross and every other petty concern, leaving only pure, mailable metal.

When the soul finally left, so did all those God inspired feelings of empathy, love and conscience; they fled along with the soul, taking with them any lingering aftertaste of humanity, all those preconceived notions of sensation. It left the spirit twisted, scoured out and numbed.

It was then, a spirit became truly demonic.

Many demons had an interesting relationship with what remained of their dulled, divorced version of pain. Crowley counted himself in that number.

For most, pain was the last true memory of what it was to feel _anything_. And something was better than nothing.

Crowley jerked his wrist against the manacles, again, harder.

He hadn’t spared a thought for such things in a long, long time.

They didn’t concern him, he’d been in acquisitions, and then management. Thinking of such things, now, unsettled him.

Ruminating on the process of demonization made him ponder what other things the supposed cure had done to him.

He couldn’t deny the change, he was feeling things, the cure had made him _more physical, more human. _

But how could that be? He didn’t have a soul, it was gone, wasn’t it?

He couldn’t pretend he didn’t notice things, such as changes of temperature, or the small discomforts he had long been accustomed to not feeling. The crusty feel of his ruined socks and boxers adhered to his meatsuit annoyed him. Physical sensations nagged at him when ever he allowed his thoughts to grow unfocused.

But the change that truly bothered him was the memories, the overlay of emotional sensation which he could have sworn were expunged from his psyche long since.

Before Moose shot him up, his backstory had been either blank or similar to reading dry history, written by an author with a penchant for telling rather than showing.

Now, the hazy un-focused memories of his human life, as Fergus Macleod kept surfacing; like so many gas bloated corpses, rising to bob on the surface of the swamp they were disposed in.

His fractured memories of the time he hung on the racks, came back flavoured with all the petty weakness and simpering cowardice that typified the erstwhile tailor.

One such memory that visited Crowley often in Moose and Squirrels dungeon, was the first time Fergus saw Lilith.

He’d been hunched over, using twisted strands of hair, hair he had wrenched from his own scalp, to thread a needle fashioned of splintered bone. The bone he had been forced to extricate from his own right foot for the task.

These materials he used to create stitches into a fabric made of his own flayed skin.

It was a task Fergus had cursed himself with. An attempt to fashion a garment as an appeasement for the demon assigned to torment him. He had been grateful of the chance to do so. Even if he was using the only material he had on offer. His own flesh.

Crowley remembered how his brutalised fingers had cramped and ached endlessly, holding onto that small tacky, blood slicked bone fragment.

The frustration and despair that near crushed him every time he pulled too hard and made the flimsy strands of hair unravel or snap. 

How difficult it had been to force the shard of bone again and again through his own flaccid, quivering flesh and create the required, tiny regular stitches.

All the while strung taut, fearfully aware of the demon in the corner of his cell. Perhaps ignoring him, perhaps not, while he stitched away.

Fergus had been smart enough to realise, his respite could end at any moment, and then he’d be back on the rack.

Lilith must have been promenading through the pit, taking in the ambiance of the racks, looking for a new game to play.

She had seen him at work, and paused. Asked what he was doing in a sweet little girl voice.

Shocked by any attention that didn’t involve agony. Fergus had explained it to her in a cracked, barely there whisper. Not daring to glance up at her or pause his task, for fear of alerting the rack demon to the presence of his visitor.

Foolish Fergus had felt a wane flicker of pride as he whispered his tale to her. Explaining how he had talked his way down off the rack, by suggesting to the demon that such a garment would make him the envy of all the other demons in their particular section of Hell.

It had been then, that the rack demon became aware of the little girl’s presence.

To Fergus’s shock, things hadn’t proceeded as he expected.

The demon had near fainted in abject terror. Scrambled to its feet to stand ramrod straight in front of the child; who giggled at it’s reaction, then began to skipped to and fro before Fergus’s tormentor, interrogating it.

The repellent creature had folded to the ground, and grovelled at the child’s feet. Replying to all the child’s questions with the fearful simpering of a sycophant.

Fergus had observed proceedings in dumbfounded bewilderment.

The faux child had been _most_ interested in how he had talked his way down off the rack. But also, mildly intrigued and delighted by how he had willingly taken on the task of torturing himself.

Even in life, Fergus Macleod had been a masochist. Of course, then, he wasn’t cognoscente of the fact.

The German novelist, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was yet to be born in Fergus Macleod’s era.

The writer wouldn’t originate the term for another 163 years.

Freud, Jung, Pavlov, Adler and the whole concept of psychology, were likewise yet to suckle their mothers teat, when Fergus Macleod lived and died in his Scottish backwater; drunk and choking on his own vomit, in that ditch. Just as his abdicated, witch of a mother had prophecied.

Fergus had been a man well acquainted with turning his anger and contempt towards the world inward, gleaning a certain grim satisfaction, and justification from the resulting affliction. 

Yet, he had foolishly hoped the child’s enterance signalled a reprieve in his damnation.

But the monsterous child, Lilith, had dashed those hopes. Proclaiming Fergus would modify the unfinished garment _for her_. Tailor it into a ‘pretty’ dress, adorned with a bow, made from the flayed skin of his own demon deal augmented manhood.

She had insisted he flay the skin for the bow himself.

Using only his shoddy bone needle.

It had taken him a long time, with Lilith watching him work avidly. Her queer milky eyes fixated on his every motion, appearing to enjoy every wretched bitten off whimper of pain passing from his lips, rosebud mouth curved into a salacious smile.

How the horrid child had clapped her tiny hands, delighted, and excited by each agonised whimper and stinging torrent of tears.

And when finally, the dress was done, Lilith had donned its suppurating, flaccid folds, twirled on the spot in delight and let loose a peel of childlike giggles.

Then, flung herself into his flayed arms, ignoring his bitten off curses of pain, to hug him in a bone crushing embrace.

Lilith declared the dress to be her favourite while showering his raw, bloody cheek with biting little kisses; a sick parody of childlike exuberance.

Lilith was no child. Bar that she was Lucifer’s first born, and liked to play at the role of being Daddies little girl.

She had been a full grown woman when Lucifer turned her. The child-form was just another pretty dress to play in. She simply enjoyed the depravity of appearing to be something small, vulnerable and innocent looking. It fucked with expectations and enhanced the horror of her atrocities. 

Lilith honed psychological torture long before humanity even invented the term.

He learned all that later.

After the chance encounter, Lilith developed a minor interest in him. She came to play with him again. More than once, and earmarked him as one of hers, to be diverted towards the crossroads.

Crowley supposed he had been attached to Lilith. Lucifer’s first born had been a monster, true, (the things she had done to him on the racks and after, he supposed were abjectly horrific) but she had given him a chance, taught him important lessons.

Surviving and learning from her games had made him stronger, better at his job.

He had climbed many a rung in Hell’s highrache because of her patronage and lessons.

When Liliths star had risen high, so had his. That reason alone excused any semblance of attachment he may have formed.

He had never liked Azazel. So, when they discovered that the whole scheme to free Lucifer from the cage hinged on Lilith’s demise, Crowley had questioned a good many things.

After Sam Winchester broke Lilith’s seal wide open, he had once again pondered the ramifications of Lucifer’s grand master plan, for bringing about the appocalypse. He’d found himself doubting the depth of Lucifer’s investment in the continuation of the demonic species.

And so he had begun his own scheme, to undermine Lucifer’s plan for overturning the apple cart. 

In it’s way that plan had led him here, chained in a devil’s trap waiting on the Hardy boys pleasure.

He tugged against the manacle once again, jerked it harder, savoured the double hit of physical and spiritual pain.

Meanwhile here he sat, with nothing better to do than to keep jerking himself off. Crowley smiled to himself at the double entendre and made a note to work that particular turn of phrase into the next conversation, when Moose and Squirrel finally saw fit to visit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 764


	17. Subtext

** Don’t Feed After Midnight **

Chapter 17: Subtext

He didn’t know how Crowley had done it, but Dean knew he had. It had to be him.  
Demon trap and fancy men of letters shackles or not, the slimy little bastard did it, somehow! Made his car— Dean snarled soundlessly as he took the stairs down to the dungeon two at a time, not wanting to think about his poor Baby like that, reduced to spare parts.

Now was the time for payback.

Wrenching open the shelving he stormed in to the dungeon.

Wound up and slugged the king of the black eyed douches in the jaw. Hard.

“Damn sonofabitch how’d you do it, Huh?”

Crowley licked his lips and blinked, gazing up at him as if he’d woken from a nap.

“Hello, to you t—“

Dean’s next blow took him square in the mouth.

Crowley spat blood and rolled his head to one side, looking up at him from under lowered lids.

“My, my aren’t we all het up. Whatever got your motor running, Dean?”

Dean rammed a fist into the demon’s gut, and it felt good!

The blow took the bastard’s breath away, left him hunched over, panting and breathless.

“You know damn well, you bastard. How’d you do it, huh?Tear her to bits, from all the way in here? Don’t care what Sam says, I’m gonna beat it outta you.”

Crowley bared his bloody teeth at him.“Her?” He asked, then smirked. “Go ahead and try Squirrel. Let’s juggle some nuts.   
Do your damnedest.”

Furious, Dean stomped his boot down into the demon’s crotch.

Watched with manic satisfaction as Crowley doubled over with tears leaking from his eyes.

“How’s that for juggling, you asshat? I’m gonna wail on you ‘til you’re in as many pieces as my freaking car!”

Dean swung away to study the racks lining the dungeon walls, with a mind to select something sharp to begin the process.

Crowley let out a wheezing bark of laughter.

“More exercise,” the demon huffed breathlessly. “Yes, that would do it.   
Well, come on then, you really think you’ve got the balls to take _me_ apart?   
Enough with the heavy petting already. Surely those bar flies must have mentioned, there’s such a thing as _too much_ foreplay.” Crowley eyed the blade in his hand with challenging eyes. “Stick it in me already big boy.”

Dean did.

….

Some indeterminate amount of time later, Crowley was bloodied and breathing rough, yet _still,_ he kept running his damn mouth.

“Dean!” Sam’s voice caught him off guard, as did the hand on his shoulder.

“Come to join in, have we Samantha?” Crowley asked, his voice rough and breathless, “can’t say I haven’t fantasised.”

Sammy ignored him, “Dean stop.” His big paw wrapped around Dean’s wrist, squeezing relentlessly until the holy water lathed blade fell from his grasp and landed with a splash and clatter on the metal work top.

“Quit it Sam, I want answers.” He snarled, ripping his arm out of Sam’s grasp. _I want payback, _went unspoken, but Sam’d heard it.

“Dean, it wasn’t Crowley!” Sam barked and took a step to put himself between Dean and the demon. He turned to stare at what he’d done to said demon, chained in the chair, his lip curled with a bitchy kind of disgust.

“Now your squeamish? You argued for offing him, remember. And after what he did to Sarah…”

“I’m, I’m not squeamish. It’s just, … can’t you see, he’s _enjoying_ it Dean.”

“Don’t be—“ for the first time Dean actually looked, and saw the telltale bulge tenting the slacks over the demon’s crotch.  
Seeing that, the ragged catch in Crowley’s breathing took on a whole new load of connotations.

“Oh, ewww!” He staggered back a step, glaring at the demon in disgust.

Crowley gazed back at him with lust blown pupils, bit down slowly on the meat of his lower lip, and winked provocatively.

“Was it good for you too Dean? I have to say, you look less pent up.”

“You sick Sonofa—“

“Now, now Dean, don’t go clutching your pearls. Don’t pretending you didn’t want it. This isn’t the casting couch, handsome.”

Sam caught his arm again forcefully and shook his head.

“The car wasn’t Crowley.” He hissed. “There was a symbol ‘round the car. Can’t place it. But, it was made of bolts, screws and other small stuff. Obviously removed from the car…   
Some of them were _iron,_ Dean.   
You tell me, how a demon— _even the king of Hell,_ could remove and meticulously place, a bunch of stuff like that, into a symbol from in here.”

Sam shoved a note pad into his hand with a symbol drawn on it. A bunch of lines and circles.   
From the corner of his eye, Dean thought he caught the surprised rise of Crowley’s brows. But when he swung his head to look directly at the demon, Crowley was impassive. 

“I’ll tell you something else Dean. Kevin and I checked, and there’s not a chip, scratch or dent on any of the parts that came off the impala. Not one!   
It’s, it’s, like some carefully orchestrated prank.” Sam ran a harried hand through his hair.   
“One set up for maximum impact and minimum carnage. Does any of that sound like _Crowley_ to you?”

“Moose is right, Squirrel. Minimum carnage. Not my style. Carnage, well, you could say, it rocks my world.” He jerked his wrists against the manacles and leaned back into the chair with a sated smile, “case in point.”

“Crowley, I swear to god.”

The demon chuckled darkly. “What Dean? Do talk dirty to me. I’m positively agape with anticipation, what _exactly_ _will_ you do to me?”

Sam snorted. “Don’t encourage him Dean. And seriously Crowley, just give it a rest already.   
Or… when this is over, we _won’t_ kill you. We’ll shoot you full of devils trap bullets, cut you into chunks and bury each one in a different state. Under 6 feet of cement.”

Crowley’s mouth snapped shut.

“Kevin thinks the unlocked door, and the lockdown are linked to whatever this is. I have to agree.” Sam continued, without so much as a sideways glance at the pouting demon. “The answer is up stairs, in the men of letters library. That symbol has to be a clue.”

Crowley smiled coyly, and leaned forward, his bloodied lips parted to speak. Sammy snapped around to glare at him and the demon subsided back with a shrug, slumping into the chair.

Sam grabbed his shoulder and started dragging him back towards the library and away from Crowley. “You have to quit letting him play you, Dean.” He muttered in hushed tones, glancing over his shoulder. “We talked about this. Bad attention for something like Crowley, is better than no attention at all.   
Let him rot.”

…ooo0ooo…

Crowley watched the Winchester’s go, with them went the light, literally and figuratively.   
They left him alone in the dark, and wasn’t that always the way.

In the end he was always alone.

He had thought he and Dean were having a moment.   
They were. It had been like they had been alone in the universe, when those mesmerising green eyes and those gun calloused hands were on him.   
Two consenting adults, a moment of pure passion.   
He had to admit it, Dean was good. The empty, freezing, sucking void in his core, the one that ached and howled inside of him without ceasing; it had felt like maybe, it could be quenched by the violence and destruction of those big strong hands.

But then Samuel bloody Winchester walked into the room, and it was like the song, a sun being eclipsed by a moon. Dean didn’t see him when Samantha walked in the room.

The moment had popped like a soap bubble.

…

“You’re looking for love in all the wrong places.” Zeke’s dry voice cut into Crowley’s thoughts from across and to the right of the dungeon doors.

“What a surprise, it’s the self help mechanic.” He replied. Leveling a sarcastic smile in Zeke’s direction, feeling the crusted blood crack and pull at the stubble around his mouth.   
“Love? Love is a crutch that the blind and weak cling to. A lie humans tell themselves to justify their pathetic little lives. Besides I’m a demon you infuriating little Dr Phil impersonator. DEMONS DON’T LOVE!”

“I never said they could, but demons lust for things they cannot experience, inspire or create.   
You want them all to look at you like your worthy, though you can never quite escape the knowledge, that you’re not.   
_You want to be loved.   
_To cherry pick a term from the tall ones head, you’re a narcissist.” 

The words made him grit his teeth but he struggled to appear un phase. “It takes one to know one.” He let the corner of his mouth tug further upwards with contempt, “your little japes and pranks, hiding in the shadows crying,_ “look at me, look at me.”_ Yet you’re too much of a simpering coward to show your face. Just like I’m guessing your kind were too cowardly to pick a side between the Seelie and UnSeelie courts. Fairy.”

A slow clapping filled the space. “Oh bravo, your highness. I had to spell it out for you in nuts and bolts, but you got there in the end.   
Now, if only you could narrow it down to a single _species_.   
Oh, and word to the wise, none of us are fond of _that_ term. Fairy.   
It’s rude and insulting. And we take insults to heart.”

There was a flicker of almost movement in the corner of Crowley’s vision. Then a cloud of dusty pinpoints of light engulfed him.  
An unpleasant hot-cold sensation squirmed it’s way over his meatsuit, his wounds started to itch and burned disgustingly as the flesh knitted itself back together.   
Wiping away every momento from his time spent with Dean.

The dungeon doors creaked open a foot, then slammed shut.

Leaving him alone in the dark again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 772


	18. Reading is fundamental

** Don’t Feed After Midnight  **

Chapter 18: Reading is fundamental 

“I don’t know how you do it.” Kevin complained from his place at the wooden table in the men of letters library. 

“Do what?” Sam responded looking up from the book he was paging through, across the table. The lines he always secretly thought resembled an upside down wifi symbol were creasing up Sam’s forehead.

“This.” Kevin jabbed a finger down on the iPad to close out of yet another webpage.

“Research? Isn’t it pretty much the same as reading the word; or writing a term paper, come to that. You _were_ in advanced placement…”

“Yeah, sure, I studied. But this, it’s different. It’s not chemistry or physics. This, it’s all… murky, like fumbling around in the dark.” He tried to explain his dissatisfaction with everything supernatural. Laid the iPad he’d been using to search for the symbol down, and picked up the note pad again. “I mean, what exactly are we looking for? You say it’s got to be a glif or symbol, okay, great. But how do I even know you joined the dots right?”

Sam shot him a tired look. “You... don’t, I guess. But, basically every culture there is has some form of trickster mythology. The symbol, it’s our only way of narrowing it down.”

“Yeah, I get that, but it’s just… frustrating.”

Sam shrugged, dropping his eyes to the book in front of him again, and turned a page, “you get used to it.”

“I don’t want to get used to it!”

  
Sam looked up again. The wifi symbol on his forehead was now joined by two deep vertical lines, and he was giving him the puppy dog eyes he’d read about, “I get that Kevin, really I do…”

“But it doesn’t change anything.” He responded flatly, letting a dejected breath puff through his lips. “This is my life, Leviathans, demons and angels. Til I die. Because I’m the sole keeper of the word of the lord, on earth, yeah I got that memo.  
The thing I don’t get is why _you_ keep doing it…”

Sam was staring at him.

“I mean everything you’ve been through… and you keep doing this. Keep trying to fix the world.”

“Well, yeah, I-I mean… if the world gets broken, it kind of effects _all_ of us, Kevin. It won’t just go away because we want it to. And if you know enough to _do something.._.”

“Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act, and in that action are the seeds of new knowledge. Albert Einstein,” he added quickly to the quote, before the hunter asked.

“Mmm,” Sam nodded, “new knowledge, pretty much.”

Something struck Kevin then. “Maybe it isn’t new knowledge we need…”

Sam huffed and rapped his knuckles lightly on the cover of the book he was reading and grimaced, dropping his eyes with long suffering sigh of agreement and he turned another page.

“No, I mean you’ve dealt with a trickster before. One that played pranks on you and tried to turn you and Dean against each other. The case with the frat boy pledge master, that ‘aliens’ probed and made to _slow dance_. And the research scientist who got eaten by an aligator from the sewers.”

Sam was staring at him.

“I mean the angels fell and now _suddenly_ there’s a trickster here, playing us off against each other... Your laptop, Dean’s car… Doesn’t that all seem kind of like a replay to you?”

“Gabriel’s dead, Kevin.” Sam was gazing at him intently, frowning. “…I never told you that story.”

Kevin gulped, suddenly nervous.

No, neither Winchester had told him that story, he’d read it in one of Carver Edlund’s books, (well, Kevin guessed they were actually Chuck Shurley’s books,) which the Charlie person had sent him. He could feel his face heating up, and Sam just kept staring at him suspiciously.

“Your friend Charlie…” he blurted out. “She sent me a link to the books, by, well, I guess, by the other prophet… the one I replaced…”

The muscles along Sam’s jaw bulged and jumped. “Seriously?!” He gritted. “The books,” Sam huffed, “if Chuck weren’t already dead, I swear to god…” his eyes narrowed. “How many did you read?”

Kevin gulped in panic, looking away from the hunter in embarrassment.

Sam huffed and Kevin felt himself flinch guiltily.

“A-all of them?” He admitted, finally peeking up at the hunter warily.

Sam rubbed his brow, shook his head and looked away, “just do me a favour and don’t tell Dean about this.”

Kevin nodded in agreement, he’d seen Dean, briefly, before Sam pulled a face and demanded he go get cleaned up. There’d been blood all over him.  
Crowley’s blood, Kevin guessed. And while Crowley deserved anything, and more, that he got. The fact was, Dean had a habit of reacting violently to things he didn’t like.

“I’m surprised Charlie would…” Sam pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed a number.

“Hey, Charlie….   
Yeah…   
I’m really doing fine.  
Pretty much back to factory specifications...   
You did tell me, yeah.”

“No, no we’re still officially working on the Angel thing.  
Hey, just called with a quick question, did you…”

“You did Huh?   
No, no, that’s okay, don’t beat yourself up for forgetting, it happens to the best of us.   
You guys can say hi right now.”

Sam held a hand over the phone. “So, turns out Charlie _wasn’t_ the one who updated your reading list.” He handed over the phone.

“Say hi.”

“Hello?” Kevin said cautiously.

“Kevin, hey, nice to meet a fellow recent innitiant, to the weirdness of things that go bump in the night! I’m Charlie, Charlie Bradbury- Well, that’s what I go by, anyway.   
I hear we have you partially to thank for the world not being overrun by chompy bitey things. Kudos on that.” A girl prattled brightly in his ear.

“Ummm don’t mention it,” he replied feeling tounge tied, “nice to meet you too Charlie. Sam and Dean have only good things to say about you.”

“Can’t say I’ve always been able to reciprocate.  
But we’re cool now.   
The Winchester’s are a disaster zone waiting to happen, but they mean well. Sam says I’m going to be your in case of emergency contact. Promise if I get that email I’ll come riding to the rescue, we’ve got to stick together right?!”

“Umm, yeah, thanks for that.” He looked up at Sam, silently begging to be saved from the flood of the girl’s prattle. It had been forever since he talked to a stranger, and frankly, he was feeling more than a little overwhelmed. “Oh, oh, Sam wants to talk to you again.” He faked, thrusting the phone back at the hunter.

“Hi Charlie, yeah….  
Huh, of course your highness…. I’ll ask, but right now we kinda have our hands full of….   
Yeah...   
No, he’s working on the car, yeah I’ll tell him...   
You make sure to call if you run across any cases…   
_Because_, hunters without backup end up dead, Charlie…” Sam pulled a face at what ever the girl said in response.

“Hey, I was serious before, and you really need to come for a _real_ visit, soon, stay a couple of days, check out the archives, meet Kevin in person…  
Yeah, yeah, you too, bye.”

Sam hung up.

“So, we can assume our trickster knows about, and has probably _read,_ all of Chuck’s books.” Sam looked worried, “that’s just… Wow!”

Kevin nodded, “How many people know about those books, anyway? Know what they are and where to find them. I mean, until I was sent them, I didn’t know, and I’m pretty good with computers. Most monsters are kind of non-technical, aren’t they? And Demi gods, I thought they were pretty full of themselves. Would a thing like that lower itself to learn how to work a computer, or read a whole load of trashy novels.”

“No. You’re right, most monsters are pretty much Ludites, but…” Sam huffed out a breath, “I just don’t know.”

“Still, I can’t help thinking all this has to do with the angels,” he tried again to get his point across, “they know Chuck was a prophet. So it makes sense they’d know about his books.”

“Yeah, but in our experience the only angel interested in picking up a book, is your friend Metatron, and according to Cas, he’s the _only_ angel that _wasn’t_ kicked out of heaven by the trials. If he’s smart, the last place he’d want to be is here.” Sam’s hands tightened round the books cover and his face hardened. “It would solve half of our problems if we could get our hands on him, then we could make him tell us how to reverse that spell.” 

“I still think it might be worth trying angel banishing sigils or something. What could it hurt?”

Sam stood up abruptly.

“Such an action would be unwise. If you will excuse me, I must confer with Dean.” Sam said, and with that he turned and walked out stiffly, Kevin starred after him, feeling slightly bewildered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 822


	19. Not a hair on his head

** Don’t Feed After Midnight **

** **

Chapter 19: Not a hair on his head

The elevator rumbled in it’s shaft, and a moment later the doors slid open.   
Dean glanced up from the door he was reattaching, wrench in hand.

  
Sam stood stiffly in the elevator cab.

“Dean, we have an issue with the prophet.”

“Hey ya Sam,” he greeted, “what’s wrong with Kev’ now.”

“I am not Sam.” Sam’s eyes flashed blue and Dean stepped back in shock, dropping the wrench, it hit the floor with a clang.

“We have an issue with the prophet.” The angel possessing his brother repeated again.

“Zeke, shit, a little warning next time.”

“The prophet believes the presence inside this facility is one of my brethren.   
It is not.”

“Uh, good to know. So what the hell is it, and how do we kick it’s ass.”

“The prophet wishes to perform an angel banishing. This can not happen.” Zeke continued doggedly. “Neither Sam nor I are strong enough to withstand such a thing.”

“Yeah, yeah I get that. An’ with heaven boarded up. Where the heck would you even go.”

“Indeed,” Zeke replied impassively. “Might I remind you also, that if Sam becomes aware of my presence, he will cast me out.   
That must not happen.   
I have done much to repair his autonomic nerve system, however, all of his other major organs are still damaged to the point that he would not long survive my ejection.”

“Yeah, no, not happening. Got ya!   
But this thing, you’re sure it’s not an angel?”

“It is not an angel, nor is it a demon.   
I suspect, the demon Crowley may know what manner of creature it is.”

“Seriously, the slimy sonofabitch, I knew he had a hand in this—“

“I believe the demon recognised the symbol, his surprise however, appeared to be genuine.”

Dean let out a sigh, “okay lets go talk to Pervey Mc Pervison.”

“I do not believe it would be wise for me to accompany you, Dean.   
As yet, the demon is unaware of my presence inside your brother. The more exposure there is, however, the greater the chance of discovery.”

Message delivered, the angel riding Sam’s body turned away and the elevator doors slid shut.

Dean shook his head, last thing he wanted to do was be in a room with Crowley. The fact that the little bastard had been getting his rocks off while he’d been attempting to torture answers out of him, it made Dean’s skin crawl.

But, given recent events he could see how Kevin and Sam would think that the asshole prankster could be an angel. If Lucifer hadn’t kabobbed Gabriel he’d be looking for candy bar wrappers himself.

So, to stop Sam and Kevin doing something that would end with Sam flatlining. He was going to have to provide another suspect, fast. And that meant he was gonna have to suck it up, and find a way to pry the info out of Crowley.

….

“Hello handsome, back for round two are we?” A slow smile crawled over Crowley’s face. There wasn’t a mark on him; and the way the demon wetted his lips and gazed up at him like a chick, from beneath lowered lashes, made Dean want to punch something, or flee. Both at once.

But that’d give Crowley the satisfaction, and Dean had learned long ago never to give slimy assholes like Crowley an inch, or they’d have you trapped up against the side of a bathroom stall.

He stood firm and hoped the heat crawling up the back of his neck wasn’t visible.

He turned away slowly, calmly, making a production of it, like Alistair had taught him, and placed the box he’d brought down on the tray, still wet and bloody from lasttime.

Crowley arched a brow, “whats in the box Dean?   
A new toy to spice up our relationship? Oh goody! I’m practically aquiver with anticipation.”  
  


Dean let the air leak slowly from his nostrils. “You never touched my car, but you know what did.” He stated.

“Perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t. By all means go ahead, try and make me tell.   
We both know which one of us will end with the greater level of _satisfaction_. But you never know, show me a good enough time, and I might spill.   
All possible entendres intended.”

Dean forced a smile through his gritted teeth. “You recognised the symbol.”

“I did.”

“You’re going to tell me what it is, and what we’re dealing with.”

“I am, am I? Out of the goodness of my heart? Doesn’t really sound like me, Dean.”

“Out of the goodness of your heart? Nah.   
But you’re still gonna tell me, you wanna know why?  
‘Cause I’ve got you made.” He started taking items out of the box and laying them out. Firstly the pair of battery clippers.

Crowley’s eyebrows rose fractionally in surprise. “Oh Dean, I can assure you, the landing strip is already landscaped.”

Dean didn’t answer, he just took a can of shaving cream and a cheap disposable razor out of the box, laying them on the tray with the subtle click of plastic, and metal on metal.

Sammy’s iPod, headphones and a roll of duct tape were still in the box, but for now he’d leave them there.

He picked up the clippers and turned back towards the demon.

Crowley was scowling with confusion.

“I found myself thinking, what would _really_ hurt a douche bag like you, if you’re such a sick sonofabitch you get off on what I did to you last time.”

Crowley leaned back in the chair with a rattle of chains. “And you realised there’s absolutely nothing. So you’re going to go down on your knees,” the demon eyed him up and down slowly, like he was a piece of meat, “and beg…”

“Huh, not likely! See our trickster reminded me of somethin’.   
Cuts and bruises, they ain’t the only thing that can hurt a man. Or Demon either. Hurting the thing he cares about, that can actually cut deeper.”

“Darling, you’re forgetting. I’m a demon, by definition I don’t care about anything.”

Dean scoffed in amusement, “Douche bags like you care. You like things a certain way, your expensive suits and dry clean only socks.   
Your meat suit.   
Think it makes you better than the rest of us Jo’s. The whole—“ he waved the clippers dismissively, “smarmy business man image.”

Crowley’s eyes narrowed and the vertical lines in his brow cut deeper.

“So, the only thing I’m gonna hurt _is_ the hairs on your head.” He slid the switch on the clippers forward and they hummed into life. “I’m gonna shave off one of your eyebrows, and half of your hair. Shave it down smooth as a baby’s butt.   
I might even get creative. Then, I’m gonna go get Sam and Kevin. And _they’re_ gonna point and laugh and take a bunch of photos, maybe we’ll even dress you in pink lace first.   
Kevin’ll post those pictures on every message board and demon bathroom wall in God’s creation.   
You’ll be a laughing stock.”

Crowley was jerking his arms against the shackles now, eyes anything but calm.

“I can get another suit!” He snarled.

Dean shrugged nonchalantly. “Sure, you could do that.   
But, see, your minions know how fond you are of this one.   
And those photos, they’d still be out there, getting passed around.   
They’d be laughin’ at you behind your back, Crowley. And how long would it be ‘til they all start thinking. If a bunch of humans can make you their bitch…”

Crowley let out a bellow of rage, jerking against the chains like a maniac.

Arms crossed, Dean waited for him to calm down. Smirking.

“Seems to me that the asshole loose in the Bunker, _messing up my car_.” He took a heavy step closer with the clippers, “means diddly squat to you, Crowley.   
So what’s it gonna be.”

“Bastard!” Crowley fumed impotently, his face screwed up in satisfying defeat.

Dean looked back at him, smirking.

“All right. You’re all hot and heavy to bend me over. Fine!  
But I want _protection_. I spill, what guarantee do I have you won’t let your Angel obsessed hairdresser side lose on me anyway. None! We either make a deal…”

“No way. I’m not selling you my soul!”

“Dean, Dean, adorable Dean. I know all sorts of sexy tricks. Binding contracts, kinda my thing. I like souls, sure.  
They’re the big ticket item. But I can work in less exotic unmentionables.   
Tit for tat scenarios. A promise for a promise, without all the unpleasant requirements for trust.”

“I’m not freaking kissing you!” The thought made Dean’s stomach clench in disgust.

Crowley eyed him up and down slowly and licked his lips. Something that made Dean think of the weird dudes at truck stops who’d offer him candy as a kid.   
Crowley smirked at him, then shrugged with a rattle of chains.

“Your loss, bring me a pen and paper I’ll write up the contract, and we’ll signature the agreement in blood.”

“I’ll write the contract!”

“No trust these days.”

“Last time I trusted you I got the crap beaten outta me by the asshole demon wearing Sam’s Stanford buddy.”

Crowley smirked up at him. “You’re not as stupid as you look. You write it out. But we agree on the wording.”

….

It took a long time to write the contract with Crowley nit picking every, single, freaking, word.

Making dead sure that neither he nor anyone associated with him now or in the future could shave, cut or in any way remove any of Crowley’s current, or future meat suits bodily hair, or photograph him without expressed informed consent.

In exchange Crowley promised to tell him the meaning of the symbol Sam had found, and everything he knew as fact about the identity of the thing that had disassembled the impala. Once it was finally written out, Dean signed it in his own blood and chanted the spell. Then sliced Crowley’s hand and watched The King of Hell awkwardly finger paint his own signature below while chanting the same words.

Crowley leaned back in his chair looking smug.

“Pleasure doing business with you, Dean.   
Oh and by the way, I always intended to spill. Least I could do after you showed me a good time. Besides, that annoying little prat has been down here making a right nuisance of itself, for days. Can’t shut the bloody thing up. You find a way to kill or banish the damn thing, you’ll doing me a favour.  
That symbol was Fae.   
Those lines and circles, that’s crop-circle-ese.   
I’m surprised your brother didn’t recognise it, normally he would, after your case in, Elwood, Indiana.   
But I suppose, Samantha wasn’t riding the soul train at the time, and things might be a bit muddy from back then. That symbol, it translates roughly as ‘Home.’ The reason it was picked out in nuts and bolts around your car… I’ll leave that for you to puzzle out.  
You’ve got a fairy in your clubhouse, Squirrel. What kind, I haven’t the foggiest. But I’m sure the brain trust upstairs ought to be capable of working it out. Satisfied?   
Marvellous!   
Off you go and hunt the monster.”

Smug little prat! It was all Dean could do not to slug the bastard, but he wasn’t going to give Crowley the satisfaction. He turned back to the box instead.

“I brought you somethin’,” he pulled the iPod, headphones and duct tape out of the box. “Thought I’d bring you something to listen to, gotta get dull down here in the dark. Things only got one track, but I’ll put it on repeat for you. Waitress I was friendly with, a while back, she had this kid. Kid freaking loved the song, it gets into your head and you can’t get it out. Downloaded it special,

Jamming the headphones over Crowley’s ears, Dean pulled the blackout hood back over his head (to protect his hair, a deal was a deal.) and wrapped the whole lot with a mass of duct tape, to keep it from shifting.

Then turned on the music, and walked out.

Tinny and muffled Dean could just hear the cast of Barney the Purple dinosaur singing their theme song, as he slid the doors closed.

_I_ _love you,  
You love me,  
We're a happy family.  
With a great big hug.  
And a kiss from me to you.  
Won't you say you love me too.  
  
I love you,  
You love me,  
We're best friends like friends should be.  
With a great big hug,  
And a kiss from me to you.  
Won't you say you love me too._

Heading up the stairs again, Dean hoped Crowley enjoyed his little musical interlude.

The song was a freaking ear worm, damn thing got in your head and you couldn’t get it out again, you’d catch yourself singing it despite yourself.

Sam always boasted his iPod could play for 8 hours on a single charge. Dean hoped he was right.

Behind him Crowley started yelling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 854


	20. Things that stick out

** Don’t Feed After Midnight **

Chapter 20:Things that stick out

_  
‘…I love you,  
You love me,  
We're best friends like friends should be.  
With a great big hug,  
And a kiss from me to you.  
Won't you say you love me too.’_

The words echoed through Crowley’s head long after the battery on the little music player had died.

He knew a lot about kisses, that little dance of lips, teeth and tongue. It was something he had always prided himself on.   
He’d long styled himself as a lover not a fighter, but of course that was the big lie.   
He’s incredibly good at the act, but there’s never any love in it, not with what he does.   
It’s all a crafted façade, but one he’s long excelled at. There is skill to it, artistry, even poetry, and that has to count for something. None of his clients could claim they didn’t get their money’s worth.   
No kiss was quite the same, just as no deal was ever quite the same.   
And a kiss could be made to convey a Hell of a lot.

Hugs on the other hand, were foreign entities.   
Demons didn’t hug. They might fuck, but that was about taking, plundering, sating lust or expressing power over others.   
A completely selfish action.   
But a hug, that was something else, a hug was designed to give.   
A form of touch as comfort or camaraderie, that drew two beings closer and signalled that the participants were not alone; that they were in something together.  
Demons had no use for such things, because in Hell you were always alone, no matter how many others were there with you. 

Only a fool admitted weakness, then allowed another demon close enough to bury a knife in your gut. 

Even in his human existence, hugs had been something foreign, a coin Fergus MacLeod hadn’t been able to earn from a mother as callous, cold and distant as the stars. 

And family?   
What family?   
As a pathetic, weak, human child Fergus MacLeod hadn’t had a clan. He hadn’t even had a father.   
Nor any siblings, his Mother had been anything but god fearing or chaste, the woman had been a witch and a whore, one who regretted giving life to her only son intensely, and told him so often, for the first 8 years of his miserable life, before going on to abandon him first chance she got. The bitch would be long dead and buried now, lost in the depths of Hell with all the rest of the faceless damned.

Family wasn’t for the likes of him. An attempt to create one while human had given him a wife dead in childbed. In-laws that loathed him and a son of his own, whom he hadn’t been able to bare looking upon, one who ended up detesting him in turn.

Sam must have told his brother about how he’d broken down in the church, about what he’d said. 

How the flannel brigade must have sniggered together over it. The King of Hell, snivelling and bawling.

_“I just want to be loved!” _

Hugs weren’t for the likes of him, he didn’t have friends, or family. He had subjects and made deals with people he could use.  
Those were the crumbs left to him.   
He’d stitched the meagre rags of that pathetic life together in Liliths tutor-ledge and made a cloak of them, forged them into something finer and harder and worn it as armour.   
Built his kingdom upon it.   
Maybe he was chronically unworthy, but he had still risen to become King of of the unworthy.   
He’d worked hard, done the hard yards under Lilith’s thumb, and finally, finally, earned that ultimate place at the top of the heap.

King of Hell.

So what if the good guys, the included ones, looked down on him, laughed or screwed him over in the end.   
He didn’t need them.   
Since he became a demon, since he became Crowley, he was stronger, smarter, better than the failed whining sack of humanity he started out as.

  
He didn’t need anyone.

And yet… the bloody fairy might be right.   
Since Sam attempted that damnable cure on him, a gnawing, aching void had opened up in his chest and made him want… want what?

Without meaning to, Crowley found himself tapping a finger to the beat of the song that still circled endlessly in his brain.

_… won’t you say you love me too…_

…ooo0ooo…

Sam was asleep, his head pillowed on a large book, a creeping patch of damp under his slack mouth, forming a darkening tide on the heavy, cracked leather cover.   
The book was one which Sam deemed too old to eat or drink around. Yet here he was drooling all over it.

Dean rolled his eyes, simultaneously kicking his brother’s chair and dropping the book he was carrying onto the table by Sam’s head.

Sam jerked upright with a gasp, hand groping for a gun he wasn’t wearing.

“Nice nap?”

Sam glared at him, ridiculous girly hair mashed flat against one side of his face.

“So, while you were getting’ your beauty sleep. Which, gotta say, Sammy, you look like you could stand a whole bunch more of. I found that symbol.”

Sam scratched at his scalp, combing a giant-ass paw through his too long mop. Then, swiped a weary palm over his eyes and leaned back in his chair.   
“You… did?”

Dean nodded and leaned over the table to tap the symbol in the open book he’d brought with him, for emphasis.   
“Mmm hmm. Turns out it’s fairy.”

“Really? A-a fairy?”

“Really.   
Kept thinking it looked like somethin’ I’d seen. Finally worked it out.   
You remember the case in Elwood, Indiana, the disappearance of Patrick Brennin, the watchmaker’s son?”

Sam frowned at him.

“First borns goin’ missing? Half the freakin’ town went X.files? Those tiny teacups and the… creepy-ass army of bedazzled figurines. You said that woman, Marion, had glitter in the glue she was sniffing. But, turned out she was actually right.”   
He prompted. Sam was still looking at him blank.

“You banged some hippy chick while I was getting’ close encountered, used my abduction as a pickup, _because you had no soul?”_

Dean saw the exact moment when Sam remembered, something cracked and splintered in his expression.   
Aw crap.

“Dean I’m—“

“—Not as good at research as I am, yeah I know. ‘Cause I’m just that awesome.” He cut in before Sam started trying to apologise for _that_. If Sam wanted to feel guilty for something, he could save the hand wringing for how he hadn’t looked for him when he landed in purgatory. Sam hadn’t had a _soul_ in Elwood, but he sure had after Roman enterprises.

His brother gave him a tired, watery look and the corners of his mouth curled downwards.   
“Yeah, you are…” His face did that earnest kicked puppy thing, which still, even after all these years, made him look like a little kid.

Sam picked up the book and started reading. 

“Of course, you realise, Dean, that saying something is a fairy is a bit like saying something is terrestrial… it just narrows things down to the plane of existence it originated in…”

“You’re forgetting something Sam. A lot of the things that little bastard pulled off my car, to make your freaking symbol, were iron.”

“Yeah, exactly, fairies are supposed to be like ghosts and demons—.”

“Not all of ‘em, turns out there’s one kind of fairy that isn’t… Gremlins, those suckers aren’t affected by cold iron, nor silver either.”

“A gremlin? Seriously?”

“Seriously. Stripe!   
Apparently the little assholes were a giant pain in the ass during the war. Had a hardon for planes… on both sides.” Dean frowned, something sort of niggled at the back of his mind, like there was something he ought to have worked out, but he couldn’t quite grasp it.

“So, how do we get rid of a Gremlin, Dean?”

He tipped his brother a shrug, “From what I read, Steven Spielberg was full of crap. Feeding ‘em after midnight and getting ‘em wet, does diddly.   
As for killing ‘em. No idea, Sam. I did the hard bit, worked out the monster of the week, figuring out the rest is why I keep _you_ round. You and Kevin hit the books, I’m gonna finish up with the impala, then head into town. Pick up a crate of cream, and a microwave. I mean, if it worked on nudist Tinkerbell…”

“Nudist?” Kevin’s voice came from behind them.

Dean grinned at the boy, “Fairies Kev’, turns out clothing is an optional extra for some of ‘em. Unfortunately, what we have here is a gremlin.   
Not a tiny naked glowing chick with perky nipples.”

Kevin gaped at him.

Sam huffed. “Dean found the symbol, figured out what our prankster is.   
It’s a fairy, a gremlin to be exact. Because they aren’t bothered by cold iron. And why do you always have to mention the nipples, Dean?”

He shrugged and winked at Kevin. “Guess they just kinda… stuck out.” With that he turned on his heel and left the brain trust to their research.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there and thanks for reading.  
I’d love it if you would drop me a kudos or a comment if you are enjoying my story so far.
> 
> 879


	21. Hot Potato

** Don’t Feed After Midnight **

Chapter 21: Hot Potato

Closing another book Sam stretched out his spine and pinched at the bridge of his nose, trying to shift the tension headache mounting up there.

His eyes were sore and gritty, sleep spawned by no actual sleep rimmed his lids and lodged in the corners of his eyes. Forty percent antique dust, sixty percent eye strain and one hundred percent exhaustion.

It occurred to Sam then, that it was taking Kevin an awful long time to get that refill on their coffee. If he wasn’t going to keep staring blankly at the same sentence, he needed caffeine, now.

He found Kevin standing in the kitchen doorway, still holding their empty mugs, he looked bemused.

Kevin lifted one hand in greeting.“Sorry Sam, guess I got distracted.”

Dean was in the kitchen, a bunch of dismembered appliances scattered around him, a box and styrofoam packaging littering the floor at his feet, the air carried the acrid tang of solder flux to Sam’s nose.

“What is Dean doing?” Sam asked, “Is he…? He is, isn’t he. He’s making some kind of—.”

“Home Alone style booby trap out of a microwave. Yeah…” Kevin said.

“Just tell me he hasn’t dismembered the coffee maker.”

“I haven’t been brave enough to ask, he looks kinda… intense.” Kevin raked a nervous hand through his greasy hair and moved from foot to foot.

Dean did look intense.  
“Okay, stay here, I’ll go save the coffee maker.” Sam pushed his way into the kitchen, wading past empty packaging.

“So is it alive_, alive_,” he asked, doing his best doctor Frankenstein impression. 

Dean looked up with a grunt from whatever he was doing with the soldering iron, behind the microwaves control panel, “the point of this Sammy, is to make the little asshat dead, _dead_!”

“So, it has _nothing_ at all to do with wanting to reenact a scene from one of the worlds most disturbing Christmas movies?”

“The fact that you think a PG13 movie, is one of ‘the worlds most disturbing Christmas movies,’ is adorable Sammy,” Dean gazed at him from under lowered lids. “An’ kinda worrying, I gotta say,” he teased smirking, as he screwed the panel back in place.

“Jerk.”

“Bitch.”

Sam spotted the coffee maker in the sink, thankfully it was still in one piece, but achingly empty of his favourite research aid.

Looking around the kitchen, Sam realised Dean was using the only two accessible power points in the kitchen for the soldering iron and microwave.

“I know, you said, this worked before, on Tinkerbell, Dean. But this Gremlin, it seems pretty smart, how are you gonna get it in there to begin with.”

“Ye of little faith. We just use cream, remember how much the little bastards _love_ cream? Put it inside, right at the back, like so. Lure it in.” Dean placed a bowl of water inside the microwave. “I’ve rigged it, so any more weight on the plate, causes the door to slam shut. “an’ rewired it, so it’ll startup soon as the door closes.” Dean tossed an apple inside the microwave.

The door slammed shut and the microwave whirled into action, just as advertised.

“Anddd cue an explosion of green blerk,” Dean crowed, grinning a shit eating smile and sketched a bow. “Sayonara Spike!”

Sam chuckled and shook his head. “That’s… actually pretty ingenious, Dean.”

Dean preened. “I’m _way_ better than Macaulay Culkin.”

That was the thing about his big brother. He played up to the whole grunt image; always claimed Sam was the brains of the outfit. But, Dean was actually pretty smart. Maybe not for memorising and regurgitating facts and figures in an exam setting, the way school required. But he had a kind of applied genius.

When people saw him do something like this, just effortless, they’d be shocked, seeing how smart Dean actually was.

Sam looked back over his shoulder at Kevin, to gauge his reaction. The boy’s jaw was unhinged and his face was a picture of surprise.

“Wow,” Kevin murmured, “yeah, that _is_ impressive. Can we stop researching fairies now? More to the point, can I have coffee? _And maybe, get back to the Angel tablet.” _

Sam frowned at his tone on the last bit, he thought the boy hated translating the tablets, but he sounded almost like a junky jonesing for his next hit. Their prophet needed some R&R, he reminded himself again; something to remind him he had a life as someone other than a research aid or prophet of the Lord.

“Did you find warding to keep the little bastard away from my car?”

“Seriously?” Kevin whined.

Sam shook his head at the prophet’s tone. “According to the lore, hag stones could protect horses from night-riding by fairies,”

“Baby ain’t a—“ Dean began.

“—They hung the stones over the horse’s mangers or tied them to the stable doors.” Sam continued, ignoring his brother’s outrage over the perceived insult. “Apparently fairies wouldn’t be able to pass underneath them.”

“Hag stones?” Dean asked eagerly, tune changed completely.

“They’re also called Adder, Odin or holey stones.   
Basically stones with naturally formed holes right through them. According to the lore, looking through one will let you see hidden things, and beings like the fae.”

“Like, in Coraline?” Kevin asked.

He didn’t recognise whatever thing Kevin was referring to, so just shrugged.

“Any chance we have any of them hag stones in storage, or can pick them up somewhere?”

“Yeah, you can get them in new age shops. Mystic Myths, in Wichata, will probably have them. Or there might be some with the supplies up in the lab.   
Assuming, Uh… hag stones will work on gremlins at all.”

Dean opened the door of the microwave and grabbed out the nuked apple and steaming bowl of water, juggled the two items like hotpotatoes for a moment, then, tossed the apple across the kitchen at him.   
“Look sharp Sammy.”

He caught it on instinct, hissing when the heat stung his palm, the thing felt gross, the spongey texture of the partially cooked fruit reminded him of the leathery give of partially decomposed bodies, grimacing he shot the ruined apple into the trash.

Meanwhile, Dean had filled a new bowl from a carton of cream and slid it into the machine, leaving the door hanging open. He put the rest of the carton into the refridgerator and slammed the door.

“I’m gonna go look for a stone with a hole in it.” Dean muttered and wandered off, leaving the mess from his project for Sam to clean up.

…ooo0ooo…

An hour later, Kevin was in his room, sitting at his desk with the Angel and demon tablets in front of him, when a series of bangs and a shrill metallic ringing, something like an old style fire alarm, nearly gave him a heart attack.

Thankfully, what ever it signified, it wasn’t the bunker going into lockdown; and the lights stayed on.

With a sigh, Kevin placed both tablets inside the box he’d covered in every warding against angels and demons he knew, and placed it in the centre of the devils trap he had drawn on the floor during the last crisis (or was it the crisis before the last one? He found it hard to remember.) 

He was still standing at the door, hand on the bolt, trying to decide if he should stay put, in case the ruckus was anything to do with Crowley; or get out, in case there was an actual fire. When he heard Dean whoop extatically from the hallway followed by the hunters heavy boot falls hurrying in the direction of the kitchen.

Sounded like Dean’s booby trap had actually worked.   
Color Kevin impressed.

As he made his way cautiously to the kitchen, Sam caught up with him and dashed past, following his brother.

A thick haze of oily black smoke spilled out of the kitchen enterance, fingering it’s way along the hallway ceiling.

Kevin followed the Winchester brothers towards the fire, but stalled in the doorway, gripping the door jam.

Flames flared and guttered inside the microwave’s metal body, reeking black smoke billowed from the vents and a small circular hole in the glass of the microwave door. 

Sam leapt forward to yank the microwave’s plug from the wall socket.

Unfortunately that didn’t do anything to stop the flames inside the machine, or the smoke.

“I take it back, this wasn’t ingenious. This was moronic.” Sam scolded and shook his head at the destroyed appliance.

Kevin wondered how long the microwave had been running.

Dean scoffed. “It worked didn’t it?”

Suddenly, the sprinkler system opened up, and the chaos was compounded by a downpour of stinking brown water.

Kevin spared a moment to be thankful that he hadn’t gone in there, and only the sprinklers in the kitchen had activated; as Sam ducked back past him, out of the downpour of stagnant water, yelling something about the shut off valve.

Dean didn’t seem concerned by the destroyed microwave, smoke, blasting alarm or the torrent of slimy water. Above the chaos, Kevin heard him crack some one liner about creaming the gremlin, as he stepped up to the microwave and bent over to peer inside, a victorious grin plastered on his face.

  
Kevin stepped back further, away from the kitchen, and the rancid water, beginning to ooze its way down the hallway, seeking out lower ground; it looked like it had been sitting in the fire system since the place was built, ten million years ago. He covered his ears to muffle the alarm, thinking that the elder Winchester’s gremlin killing plan might be more messy and destructive than the gremlin itself, wondered if he could make a run for it, back to his room, to avoid being enlisted in clean up.

Dean popped open the door of the microwave at nearly the same time the alarms and the sprinklers cut out.   
_Thank you Sam!_

“Sonofabitch!” Dean stepped back, coughing, and stumbled away from the cloud of smoke that poured from the guts of the charred and battered machine.   
He swore again, sounding upset, but Kevin couldn’t see why.

Dean took another step back and his foot went out from under him, sliding on something on the floor.

Dean stumbled backward further, and caught himself against the refrigerator, causing the door, that had been standing open a few inches to slam shut, loudly.

The older Winchester honest to god _snarled_, as he bent over and picked up the thing he’d slipped on. A flattened and empty cream carton, that had been laying on the floor by the refrigerator.

Sam was back. He walked in, over to the microwave with a fire extinguisher, and shot a burst inside.

  
Doused the guttering flames and blew out most of the noxious smoke.

Leaning over, the younger Winchester peered into the microwave’s interior and huffed a short snort of something that was almost laughter.

“Is that the Glock 9mm? The backup gun you had stashed under the table in here?”

Dean walked closer and stood beside his brother, peering in at the smoking mass of melted plastic and metal, empty cream carton still in hand.

“It was.” He muttered sourly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 924
> 
> So there’s a whole bucket load of videos on YouTube of people microwaving various things.  
There is a video of someone microwaving a Glock 9mm, the gun does melt and catch on fire but it actually fires the bullet that’s in the chamber.  
And yes, the water that comes out of fire systems is really gross as heck, from sitting in the pipes stagnating for years and years, my hubby's a tradie and has personal experience.
> 
> So... the spn finale ... it wasn’t as bad as I expected with Dabb at the helm... after how the last three seasons, I’ve been really dejected with the shows direction and writing and was expecting to feel no feelings at all. To just be relieved that it was over and there was no way Dabb could ruin Spn further.  
Instead I cried.  
I’ll miss the show and the boys and Covid really messed stuff up. I’m pretty sure no matter how the show ended there’d be people that weren’t happy. Trying to please everyone is a sure fire way to make nobody happy. 
> 
> But hey, Endings are hard! And we all have the power in our hands to create a fanfic story with the ending we wanted. So how about you give it a try 😊


	22. Extinction events

** Don’t Feed After Midnight  **

Chapter 22: Extinction events

The doors to the dungeon rumbled open by a foot, followed soon after by halting, unsteady footsteps that stumbled and weaved across the space.

Then, something invisible, but about the mass of a terrier slumped heavily against his shin.

Oh joy, Crowley enthused sarcastically to himself, the aggravating little bastard was back.

“I’m guessing the noise up there is your doing, and I don’t suppose you came down here to die, did you?” He asked dryly and jiggled his knee in irritation as he attempted to dislodge his unwelcome guest.

Unfortunately the annoying little pest didn’t take the hint, and die or piss off.

“Very much so, and no. Jus’ been over indulgin’.” It answered in a smug, slightly slurred voice, settling itself more comfortably against his leg.

Ah well, it was a diversion from the utter boredom of his unwilling incarceration.

“Oh, do tell.”  
  


“Thought they could trap _me_ ina machine, made t’ cook food, usin’ electromagnetic radiation. Me!” The fae scoffed. “My kind taught ‘em t’ harness electrons. It’s …” a snort of derision, “ laughable.”

“Electrons? Ha! I’d have believe your boast if you were running your mouth off about magic or toadstool circles, but what does a _fairy_ know about that kind of thing.”

“That’s what you know, ‘m not jus’ any fairy. ‘m a gremlin. We’re spe-cial.”

Crowley raised a brow. “Gremlin you say? I was under the impression Der Führer’s pet necromancers, made a deal with the Unseelie court to banish all your lot, back in the late 1930’s.”

To be honest Crowley felt no small amount of bitterness over the whole debacle.   
He’d been in Germany at the time with Lilith, in the midst of negotiations for the exact same purpose, when they’d been pipped to the post.   
He’d quite liked Hitler’s Germany. Had fond remembrances. A demon had been able to do exactly what they wanted and barely an eyebrow was raised. Lilith had been so busy taking her sadism out on the Jews she’d barely bothered with him. Consequently he always remembered his time in Nazi Germany with sentimental regret, a particularly idilic holiday, cut short by extenuating circumstances. 

“Ah, Queen Mab o’ the Winter Court, that one knows how t’ hold a grudge.” The Gremlin mused drunkenly. “Both sides wanted us t’ spy for them, t’ pick a side in their stupid, endless war… wouldn’t take no f’r ‘n answer. We fled here, t’ this realm. Our leaders figured, since ‘mmunity to iron marked us out… teach humans t’ use it, make machines, harness ‘lectrons… poison this world ‘gainst both sides o’ the courts, make your lot ‘n’ ourselves safer.”

Crowley bristled slightly, objecting to the gremlin lumping him in with humanity. Humans were just a bunch of soupy chrysalises, he was beyond mere humanity!  
But, ever the pragmatist, he forced himself to stay silent and listen.

“But nooo, the Courts couldn’t leave us well enough alone, could they? Both o’ em had t’ come hunting us. Had t’ punish us f’r not joining their damn war.   
Then, you humans started warrin’ too, usin’ the things _we_ taught you.   
Seelie, Unseelie, human, you bas’ards … all the same.   
Now ‘m the las’.   
I was messing with one of them warplanes. Got trapped ina reconnaissance camera by some over educated airman. Bas’ard said his brother was a Man o’ Letters.   
Guess tha’s why I ended up here.   
This place’s some kinda Man o’ Letters store house... Been here for _years, stuck ina camera. _Til one o’ ‘em dropped it, let me ou’. This place’s warded ‘gainst practically ever’thin’, even banishings ‘pparently.   
Lucky me.”

“Men of Letters you say?” Crowley asked rhetorically, “I was under the impression they, like you lot, were gone.   
Supposedly, they had a storehouse just chock full of lore and arcane treasures.”

He looked around him with new, calculating eyes. Could he _actually_ be sitting in the middle of the supernatural mother lode?

“Rumour also had it, that a certain knight of hell was looking for it.   
The disrespectful scag disappeared, about the same time the entire American Men of Letters roster died in some fire, back in ’58.”

The gremlin didn’t respond.

“Hmm… all of a sudden, Abbadon’s back, and Moose and Squirrel are kicking round in a Men of Letters facility? Me thinks you weren’t the only thing the dumbass duo let out.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 963
> 
> Happy New Year folks, is anyone still reading this? 
> 
> I know it’s not Destiel but ...come on. Could you throw a writer a cookie. A Kudos, a comment, some scathing criticism ... anything.  
Please?  
I’m truely not fussy I just want to know I’m not alone, lately I feel like non-Destiel writers have suffered their own extinction event.


	23. Bias

**Don’t Feed After Midnight**

Chapter 23: Bias

  
  
The next day Kevin woke to the smell of coffee and bacon.

Serendipitously he’d managed to dodge clean up duty the night before with a sudden nose bleed; prompting the brothers to have one of their silent debates. They’d ‘generously’ sent him away to clean up and get some sleep. 

According to the clock by Kevin’s bed, he’d slept 13 hours and his near ever present headache had loosened to a numb kind of tightness that lingered at the back of his skull. Other than that, he felt better than he had for months. The smell of bacon made his mouth water and his stomach grumbled demandingly.

Like one of those characters from an early Saturday morning cartoon, he followed the smell, utterly tantalised, feeling like he all but floated after it to the kitchen in the wake.

To his relief there was no sign of the previous days drama, the kitchen was spotless, and there was neither sight or smell of rancid water, the only sign, one blackened shell of a microwave sitting out in the hallway.

When he entered the kitchen he found Dean at the grill, flipping pancakes and stirring a skillet of eggs. Sam leaned against the island bench, like Kevin, he looked as though he’d only just woken.

“Hey.” Sam greeted him with a smile. “Feeling better?”

“Yeah,” just then, his empty stomach made it’s presence known by grumbling embarrassingly.

Dean looked over his shoulder with a hum, “Great timing Kev’. Grubs almost ready. Grab some plates will ya?”

Kevin busied himself setting the table while Sam filled mugs with coffee.

The Winchesters weren’t ones to stand on ceremony. Dean loaded all their plates with pancakes, bacon and eggs, then promptly began stuffing his own face like he hadn’t seen food in a month.

Sometimes it didn’t pay to look directly at Dean while he was eating, this was obviously one of them. Table manners were something the elder Winchester saved for more public settings, even then, he tended to forget if there weren’t any ladies present to impress.

“We have a whole library here, and you’re tellin’ me we don’t have a single book that tells us how to kill a fairy?” Dean groused around a bulging mouthful of half masticated food.

Sam set his fork down with a sigh and pinched at the bridge of his nose. “There are just so many conflicting accounts, some texts say they’re immortal, that you _can’t_ kill them.” Dean scoffed in response to that.

“And some that they’re just really long lived. Gremlins themselves are worse, if you can believe that. They only seem to come into the literature in the 1900’s, then, mentions of them all but dry up after World War II.”

Kevin swallowed his own mouthful before adding to the discussion. “The greatest concentration of fae lore seems to be Gaelic,” he piped up.

Dean frowned at him questioningly. “Scottish and Irish. I’m guessing, the problem is that the Men of Letters started as an English thing.   
Gremlins only started mattering to them because they interfered with the Allied war effort.   
Before that, the English attitude towards tales of non-humanoid fae, or wee folk, were pretty dismissive. According to one report I read, the Men of Letters, or the author anyway, thought people of Gaelic decent were, ‘drunken, barbaric, superstitious savages;’ and their accounts of the wee folk, to be, ‘ half seen wildlife, mistaken reports, spawned by excess alcohol consumption.’”

Dean half choked on a mouthful. “You’re kidding.”

“He really isn’t, Dean. Systemic racism isn’t a new thing.”

“But, it’s lore isn’t it! … Wasn’t the whole point of the Men of Letters, to know about the supernatural shit!”

“They weren’t above bias, Dean.” Sam took a swig of his coffee and nodded to himself. “Haven’t you noticed how little Native American lore there is in the library, I mean considering how the indigenous people were here, in America, first.   
I mean don’t get me wrong, the Men of Letters knew the fae were real, there’s records of practitioners like Boltar the furious, binding the fae or making deals with them for stuff. Like that guy from Elfwood, was it?” Sam grimaced like he had a headache and rubbed at his forehead.

“Elwood.” Dean corrected absentmindedly. Kevin found himself frowning in response to the youngest Winchester’s mistake, Sam was usually so good with town names, practically encyclopaedic.

“But for the most part the men of letters didn’t believe or record first hand accounts about what they called the wee folk.” Sam continued. “Especially from people they considered to be unreliable and uneducated at best, and baldfaced liars at worst.” 

“Typical pompous assholes!” Dean flared, “—Like his Royal doucheiness downstairs.”

Kevin frowned at that. “But, wasn’t Crowley originally Scottish?” Sam gave him a sharp look and Kevin realised too late, that was information he’d learned from reading the Supernatural books.

“Mmm.” Dean muttered, unaware, from across the table, around another giant mouthful of pancake and bacon. “Dude used to wear a skirt with one of them furry purse things over his family jewels. Demons used to call him lucky the leprechaun, behind his back.”

“Leprechaun’s are Irish, Dean.” Sam huffed quietly.

“Scottish, Irish, close enough. ‘m just repeating what that demon that Bobby BBQed said.”

Kevin struggled not to bristle, not that he cared what nationality Crowley had been when he was human. But, ‘_close enough_,’ that’s what people always said when he corrected them about what flavour of Asian American he _actually_was. Twenty seconds ago Dean had been acting offended by the Men of Letters racial bias. But, fact was, he wasn’t much better with his throw away comments about people, especially those not straight, white, male or ‘American,’ and he’d seen those busty Asian beauty skin mags Dean had a thing for.

“Well!” Dean pushed back his chair abruptly. “You two are on clean up duty an’ I’m goin’ into town.” Kevin felt another flash of irritation, _amazing_ how Dean found excuses to dodge research.

“Priscilla, from Mystic Myths promised to overnighted them Hag stones. In the meantime, you-“ Dean stole a strip of bacon off Sam’s plate, prompting him to lunge across the table to make a grab for it, but, Dean shoved the entire thing in his mouth before Sam could retrieve it. “—keep lookin’ for a way to kill th’ freakin’ gremlin.” He finished the orders around his mouthful of the stolen pork product.

Sam kicked out at his brothers leg, but Dean sidestepped easily, retreating with a laugh, and a mocking. “Too slow.”

“Jerk!”   
Sam’s voice was sharp with annoyance but his smile was indulgent as he watched his brother depart.

“Want the rest of my bacon?” Sam offered after Dean’s footsteps had faded.

“Don’t you want it?” Kevin asked, confused.

The corner of Sam’s mouth quirked up, eyes still on the kitchen doorway. “Only when Dean’s around,” he admitted ruefully, giving Kevin a wide conspiratory smile.   
But the smile just made Kevin feel lonely.

The Winchesters had their own language of gestures and half spoken phrases that only the two of them could interpret.   
Even now, having read the Supernatural books it didn’t help, not really. Sometimes it was like the Winchesters were on one side of sound proof glass, and he was on the other, looking in on them.

He remembered having something similar, but different with Channing and his Mom. The ability to use Mandarin in a room full of people. To have their secrets stay secret from everyone listening.  
Now Mom and Channing were dead and he was alone. In some ways he’d felt less lonely hiding in that church, (except for that niggling empty feel of being without the word of God.)

At least then he’d got to believe the people he loved were still out there, that he was protecting them. But now, Crowley had taken even that small hope from him. 

“I’m so over this.” He sighed wearily. Sam looked at him and away from the dishes he was washing.  
“I just really wish we had a fairy tablet!” He added quickly, to camouflage the deepening depression he was plunging himself into.

“I’d think you’d be over staring at the ones we’ve got.” Sam replied quietly his eyes too knowing as he handed over a dripping plate for Kevin to dry.

“I am, I am… it’s just … at least _with, the word of God,_ we know the info’s _real_. That if we try something from it, it’ll work…”

Then it hit him.

“Of course!” The plate slipped through his fingers and clattered to the countertop.

Kevin barely registered that the plate hadn’t shattered before he took off to his room at a run.  
Sam was calling after him but he couldn’t stop to explain, not yet. There was a different kind of tablet that might just hold some answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1000
> 
> Sorry this chapter took so long, it feels like I’ve been chipping away at it in slow mo. Writing is not the sort of thing that lends itself to constant interruptions.  
But! The kids are finally back at school again after the Summer holidays. Well... they should be, but the smallest has a tummy bug. Mummy’s getting lots of cuddles, but not much sleep. 
> 
> Thanks for reading and don’t forget to click the Kudos or comment. It makes my day to get input.


	24. The more you READ, the more you’ll KNOW. The more you LEARN, the more places you’ll GO

** Don’t Feed After Midnight **

Chapter 24: The more you READ, the more you’ll KNOW. The more you LEARN, the more places you’ll GO

“You were Scottish.” Dean stood arms crossed and eyed Crowley.

“And your meddling is why Abbadon is back. Do you _know_ what you let out? Do you?” The demon accused in response.

“We didn’t _let_ her out,” Dean bristled. Then took a breath and shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably, admitting to himself that, yeah okay, they may not exactly be to blame for Abbadon being in 2013; but he and Sammy had kinda let the demon bitch escape, again.   
_That_ was _Crowley’s_ fault, he argued to himself, while they continued eyeballing each other; if the asshat hadn’t called at the exact moment they were sewing Abbadon back together, and if they hadn’t had to step outside to avoid her eves dropping. Then, the bitch wouldn’t have managed to pry the devils trap bullet outta her noggin somehow. 

Crowley read the discomfort as him admitting guilt. He sneered.

“Funny, here we are in a Men of Letters facility. And last Hell heard of her, back in ’58. Azazel sent Abbadon on a mission. Something to do with the Men of Letters; if Lilith’s spies were to be believed and I’m inclined.   
Lilith, she had a _unique_ way of dealing with those who dared misinform her.” The muscles along the demon Kings jaw bunched and jumped before he shook his head.

“Thing is, Darling, all hell knows Abbadon vanished off the radar same day as the Men of Letters here, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, appeared to snuff it. Some kind of god awful conflagration.   
Doesn’t take a genius to join the dots, just someone smarter than a Winchester.”

“Well, hate to tell ya, you ain’t smarter. Joined ‘em wrong, asshole. Demonic bitch time traveled. Back to the futured herself, while chasing after a Man of letters.”

A look of surprise flashed briefly over Crowley’s face. “So it wasn’t blather, she actually time travelled! And yet, I still can’t help thinking you two are the cause. You’d have me believe that Abbadon _just randomly_ turned back up and answered my call, at the same time you just happen to stumble over, and started squatting in a Man of Letters facility.”

“We’re not squatting, you prick. Me an’ Sammy we’re _Legacies_, got every right to be here.”

“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.” The demon jerked his wrists making the chains binding him to the chair clatter harshly. “You’re just thugs, hunters born and raised.”

“Turns out we’re both.” Dean flared. Then it occurred to him, that he was letting Crowley goad him into saying too much. He stopped himself.   
“I’m not here to talk about my family,” he gritted out.

Crowley licked his lips, head tilted. “You’re here to ask banal questions, about my not so illustrious beginnings. I remember.”

“Fairies!   
‘parently Scots are Garlic an’ a bunch of fairy lore is garlic. Join those dots.”

“Gaelic,” Crowley corrected haughtily, “_garlic_ is a plant, of the genus, Allium, from the onion family.”

“Whatever! Point is, you knew that scribble of Sam’s was fairy. ‘cause you’re _gay-lick_ and so’s the lion share of the lore on these bastards. You know more than you’re letting on.”

“I do. Know more, but why should I tell you.”

“You said, you wanted the Gremlin dead.”

“Maybe, I’ve changed my mind.” Crowley tipped his head to one side again, fingers drumming on the arm of the chair as if weighing his options. “Nah. Tell you what, mate. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

“You show me _that_ and I’ll chop it off and ram it down your perverted throat!”

“Really, Dean? I'm trying to conduct a professional negotiation here, and here you are, going on about your sexual fantasies?” Crowley raised a brow and smirked. “Missing your time _under_ Alistair are we?   
Not that I’d mind, might be interesting. Difficult to find a playmate who’s got your skills with a blade.   
But, what, oh what, would little brother say if he saw…All the awful things you‘ve done, he might realise how much you enjoyed it _downstairs_ with Alistair…”

Dean felt his mouth go dry and his gut clench sickly. _How much did Crowley know about that?! The things Alistair had made him do…_

“What I _meant_, Dean,” Crowley continued unabated, “was that we both want information. You want to know what I know, about the fae; and I want to know what you know, about that scheming harlot, Abbadon.”

…ooo0ooo…

“Kevin! Hey, hey Kevin, hold up! What’s going on?” Sam called after the prophet’s retreating back. But Kevin didn’t stop.

When Sam caught up to him, the boy was standing in the middle of one of the devils traps he’d drawn on the floor, clutching an iPad and scrolling frantically.

“Kevin, everything alright?” Sam asked low and careful.

Kevin grunted, eyes still on whatever he was doing on the iPad.

“Sam, how much do you remember about that fairy case.”

“Uh, this guy Boltar the furious, his real name was Gerry. He was involved in this Moondoor LARP, that’s live action role pl—“

“No! Not that case. The first one you worked, in Elwood. With the watch maker.”

“I Ah…” Sam floundered.

“You don’t remember, do you?” Kevin glanced up at him over the tablet.

“Well, it’s kind of fuzzy, Uh I …”

“You were souless.” Kevin said, deadpan like he was talking about having a dose of the flu.

Sam winced. His throat felt tight, like he had an icy cold hand clamped around his windpipe. “Yeah.” He muttered through dead lips.

“Do you _remember_ how you banished the Leprechaun?”

“I Uhh….”

“There was a book, Brennan used it to summon the leprechaun, I thought you guys didn’t mention it because it got destroyed. Like the spell book that the mage, Boltar, was it, used to bind the fairy, in the case _you’re_ talking about.   
But that wasn’t it. You just don’t remember. Do you? And Dean probably thinks, because _you_ haven’t bought it up, that the book won’t work, but here, see!” Kevin held the iPad under his face and jabbed his finger on a paragraph of text.

_“Sam grinned, a cold flash of teeth, as he watched the leprechaun stoop to count the scatter of salt grains he’d spilled from the rocksalt round.”_

Kevin read the passage about his past aloud to him from the iPad, while Sam listened numbly.

_“‘Why didn’t I do that earlier,’ he asked himself out loud with a contemptuous huff, turning away from the incapacitated leprechaun. It sat cross legged on the floor, counting the salt; _ _just as Marrion, the woman he had mocked as a glitter glue sniffing whack job, said fairies were compelled to do._

_‘Talk about a crippling case of OCD,’ souless Sam joked to himself and wiped absent mindedly at the dribble of blood coming from his split lip, barely aware of the injury. _

_He hunched his tall frame down over Brennan’s Grandmother’s book and flicked back his long hair. Coolly started reading out the last of the banishing spell, from where the dead watchmaker had left off._

_As Sam finished the spell, all over the town of __Elwood Indiana__, a series of bright flashes of light appeared. The invading fairies, large and small, were sucked in to those lights and banished once more; back to their own realm of reality.”_Kevin finished reading the paragraph.

Sam’s head ached dully.  
A scatter of murky memories fought for predominance, trying to rise to the fore, against his blood soaked memories from the same time in hell. He pinched at the bridge of his nose and stared dumbly at the prophet, too sick and overwhelmed by the competing memories to think properly.

“Don’t you see Sam.” Kevin said urgently. “Brennan only summoned the one leprechaun. But the banishing ritual, it worked on _all_ the fairies in Elwood.”

Sam stared down at the boy and his iPad, that told a disconcerting half remembered tale of his life as a souless monster.  
The only thing that really stuck from that particular case, for his souless self was having sex with the hippy chick. And being annoyed at Dean for being overly emotional about his abduction.

Finally, he took the little device from Kevin’s hands and made himself read over the portion of Chuck’s book again for himself.

“What happened to Brennan’s grandmother’s book, Sam!” Kevin prodded, a hopeful look on his face.

“I, ah, I don’t know… But Dean would.” He offered the prophet a slightly forced smile.“With any luck the book will be in the impala, or one of our storage units. You did really great, Kevin. Dunno what we’d do without you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1032
> 
> Now we are getting somewhere. I can’t promise updates will be any quicker, since I’m juggling one too many fics for my liking and life is a busy thing, but we’re on the down hill run now.  
As always kudos and comments increase my feelings of obligation, and makes me sit my butt down and write instead, of listening to CreepyPastas, watching that Russian Cougar Messi on YouTube and scrolling through Pinterest to find new recipes to try out in my new mission, to dispose of the many, many apples our tiny dwarf apple tree has blessed us with this year.


	25. Prophetic Trauma

** Don’t Feed After Midnight **

Chapter 25: Prophetic Trauma

Kevin was so focused on the Angel tablet that he didn’t hear the bunker door thunk open, then closed again. He didn’t hear Dean’s heavy bootsteps come down the metal stairs and through the war room.

The first thing that made him aware of Dean’s return was the smell of food.

A cord tugged around his neck, the attached Hag stone thunking loudly onto the wooden table beside the Angel tablet.

“And these, are yours.” Dean announced as he dumped a takeout bag in Kevin’s lap, slapped his shoulder and ruffled his hair. “Good job kid.”

“Yeah, um, thanks.” Kevin fingered the Hag stone strung on the sturdy burgundy cord and lifted it to peer through the hole.

Across the table, behind his laptop, Sam was doing the same thing with another stone.

Looking through the hole in the stone caused a weird distortion of the light thrown up by Sam’s laptop screen, it almost looked as though the hunter had a halo. Kevin blinked and rubbed at his eyes. _Too much time staring at the word of God_, he thought, hoping all the weird holy eyestrain wasn’t going to leave him needing glasses.

Dean waved a piece of paper.“Says here, apart from helpin’ you see fairies, an’ keeping them off stuff; hopefully. Hag stones are supposed to stop bad dreams and help you get knocked up.”

Sam huffed. “Is _that_ why you aren’t wearing one? You do understand, you can’t get pregnant, right Dean?”

“Yeah, yeah, funny. I taught _you_ ‘bout the birds and the bees, jackass. Besides, I’d hate to give you more target practice.” Dean’s mouth thinned and he looked away briefly with something like regret clouding his face.  
Sam ducked his head in response, jaw clenched, and Kevin suddenly remembered.   
Dean once had a daughter, Emma, born from a one-night stand with an Amazonian. Sam shot her. Admittedly the daughter had been a monster intent on killing Dean and Sam was only trying to protect his brother. But Dean hadn’t realised that at the time and maybe he still held reservations over his brother’s actions.

_Man, the Winchesters had so many reasons to be messed up._

Dean shrugged off the moment, pulled a burger from the takeout bag on the table and took a giant bite.   
“Mystic Myths only had three, mine’s in the impala.” He said with a full mouth.

“Yeah, uh,” Sam cleared his throat, allowing the subject change, and let the awkward moment lurch by.   
He held up his own stone. “Well, I’m thinking this one would do more good in the machine room. We don’t want Spike putting the bunker into lockdown again.”

Dean grunted.

“So, was Brennan’s grandmother’s spellbook in the car?” Kevin asked hopefully, trying to dispel the tension.

“Nah, I looked after we got off the phone. Vaguely remember now, it’s gotta be in Dad’s, Rover Hill, lockup.”

Sam swallowed his mouthful of fries.“That’s three days, there and back,” he groused.

“Yeah well, you two hang here incase Cas gets back, I’ll take a road trip.”

“Dean—“ Dean’s phone began ringing before Sam could finish.

“Irv, long time no see.” Dean answered the phone affably.

Whoever Irv was, he had a lot to say.

“Yeah no, we’re not lookin’ to capture a demon anymore. That project was a bust.”

Kevin nibbled at his fries, and stifled a wave of resentment over how easily Dean brushed aside his work on the demon trials. Watched the hunter’s face contort as the Irv person said something more.

“That many demon signs, Huh?”

“…”

“Ahhh crap. Yeah, okay, you’re right, that does sound like something we oughta check out.”

“…”

“No Irv, you leave it alone. We’ll check it out.   
Might have ta do with this other thing we got goin’ on.”

Dean nodded at whatever Irv said next and pulled a face.

“You hear the skuttlebutt yet? That meteor shower last week. Hate to Chicken Little on you man; but not a bunch of rocks or space junk.   
That, my friend, was a buttload of angels falling, and listen, this is important, they need meatsuit’s just like demons, but they gotta ask permission.”

“…”

“Yeah, spread the word, that’s a big ol’, ‘Just say No,’ okay?”

“…”

“Yeah, Irv, fallen angels.”

Dean listened for another long moment.

“Pretty much.   
Well, trust me, they're just monsters with good PR.   
So, if you run into one, torch his ass with holy oil.   
Oh, and if they drop, uh, like, a silver sword, grab it. Those pigstickers come in handy.”

Another silence on Dean’s part, more talk on Irv’s.

“Hey, look, I know this is weird, but—“

Dean kept talking but Kevin didn’t bother trying to follow the conversation, he was too concerned by the stubbourn look on Sam’s face. The younger Winchester had been none too pleased by the idea of Dean going off alone, to get Brennan’s book.

Whatever this Irv guy was talking about, it made it even less likely Sam would willingly let his brother go off alone for three days in a world besieged by fallen angels. 

The Winchesters might argue about it for a bit, but they were going to leave him here alone, again.

The thought of peace and quiet might be attractive… but they were also probably going to leave him here, alone with Crowley.

The gremlin didn’t really worry him much, it was annoying, but he didn’t think it would harm him, he had the stone after all.

Crowley on the other hand…   
No matter what Dean said, the hag stone wasn’t going to protect him from the nightmare he’d lived, the nightmare that was real.   
Crowley was just downstairs.   
The demon had found him on Garth’s boat, when the Winchesters had told him it wasn’t possible. Crowley had filled his head with whispered threats and illusions from afar. Then found and abducted him.   
Set him up in a simulacrum of Fizzels Folly. It had only been Crowley’s fake Sam and Dean forgetting the secret knock, then being too nice, that had made him doubt and clued him in to the deception.

Sometimes he still wondered if everything here in the bunker was real, or if it was all just an illusion made to trick him.

Castiel might have healed his body after everything Crowley did to him. But, there was nothing that would take away the memories.  
Of that British accented voice, so seemingly reasonable and civilised as it spewed threats and promises.   
The demon’s beard rasping roughly against his gore coated skin.   
Hot sulphurous breath pouring into his ear and over the nape of his neck.   
Those hands around his throat, lifting and holding him up against the wall, his feet kicking helplessly in useless struggle…

Kevin felt his throat tighten and his heart begin skudding desparately inside the cage of his ribs.   
He struggled to keep breathing in and out, slow and even. To stave off a panic attack and another bout of hyperventilation. 

He forced his mind away from Crowley desperately and tried to remember every note in the opening refrain of Brahm’s, Cello Sonata No. 1.   
Moved his fingers against the tabletop in the shape of the chords; pressing down on the wood until his joints were aching and almost numb with the strain.

Finally he got himself under control.   
It sounded like Dean was finishing up on the phone. “So, if you run into any problems, give a call, okay?

The more hunters that know, the better.”

Dean hung up.

“So, that was Irv Franklin, you remember him, Sammy?”

“Yeah, friend of Bobby’s, right? Simese twin werewolf guy.” Sam rolled his eyes.

“That’s him,” Dean confirmed and wiggled his eyebrows which made Sam huff in response.

“Irv recons something demonic’s shaking, literally. Isolated earthquakes, cattle mutilations, weird-ass weather, the whole nine.”

“Crowley’s followers? Or something to do with the angels, maybe?” Sam guessed.

Dean hummed agreement and ate a fist full of fries.

“That’s my guess.   
Or, could be something to do with Cas and that freaking spell Metatron talked him into.” He rubbed at the back of his neck and bit his lip.

Kevin could never work out how he felt about Castiel.

The Angel had saved him from Crowley and healed his injuries after the things Crowley had done to him, he’d even grown back his severed finger.   
Which meant he might be able to play the cello again, one day.

But Kevin never got the feeling that the Angel saw him as anything, but a means to an end.  
They definitely weren’t friends.

Castiel was a wild card. He’d double crossed the Winchesters to work with Crowley in a play for power; and caused the Leviathans escape from purgatory.

That, in turn led to their leader, Dick Roman, unearthing the Leviathan tablet; and Kevin’s subsequent activation as a Prophet of the Lord.

If you thought of it like that, Castiel had ruined his life and caused his Mom’s death, just as much as the King of Hell.

Castiel had caused the whole fallen Angel mess as well; and Kevin couldn’t seem to get past the memory of how Castiel had grabbed him by the front of his sweater and yanked him up, (so like Crowley with that implacable, inhuman strength,) how the Angel had loomed there, right in his face and spat. ‘_There is no out. Only duty. __You are a Prophet of the Lord, always and forever... ...until the day you cease to exist, and then another Prophet takes your place.’_

How’d Dean put it? _‘angels – they don't care. I think maybe they just don't have the equipment to care.’ _

It had never been clearer than when he hung there, in Castiel’s grip, that the Angel didn’t give a fuck about him.   
The prophet.  
The word keeper.   
Kevin Tran’s entire value lay in a job description. Being a living breathing decoder tool; and if he didn’t do the task he’d been created for, well, Castiel would impassively toss him aside, without a second thought.

So, if the Angel of the lord, was actually human now, there would be a certain taste of spiteful poetic irony in it for Kevin. The asshole would finally get to see what it was like, to be a pathetic, powerless human.

While Kevin had been caught up with his own thoughts, the Winchesters had started arguing over Dean checking out Irv’s thing, on the way to getting Brennan’s book, alone.

“Kevin will be perfectly fine here by himself, Dean. Crowley’s shackled in the dungeon, in the middle of a devil’s trap. He isn’t going anywhere.   
Seriously man, if there’s that many demonic omens, whatever Irv found is more than a milk run, and you know it!   
You’ll be fine for a couple of days, won’t you Kevin? I mean we could call Charlie …”

The thought of being babysat like a child by the Charlie girl, a girl who sounded no older than he was, filled him with annoyance.

He imagined her lording it over him and acting like she was his Mom. He wasn’t some kid!   
“No, I’ll be fine. I can handle myself.”

Dean was frowning, looking at him with a kind of speculative worry, probably remembering how he’d found him curled in a ball and terrified of a freaking _washing machine._

“I said, I can handle myself!” He argued hotly. “I did it for a whole year, didn’t I?”

Dean glanced at Sam again. “Yeah, you did. Just don’t forget to eat, and no stayin’ up all night translating, okay kid?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He rolled his eyes. “No keggers, I get it.”

Five minutes later, he was alone. Alone except for the heavy stifling presence of Crowley down in the dungeon, below his feet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1068
> 
> It always takes longer than you think it will, doesn’t it. Husbands having car accidents really doesn’t help, just sayin’


End file.
